


Easy Hearts

by starseed



Series: Avenues [3]
Category: Hanson (Band)
Genre: Anal Sex, Angst, Bathrooms, Cheating, Drunk Sex, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Escapism, Forbidden Love, Infidelity, Language, Male Slash, Minor Violence, Multi, Oral Sex, POV First Person, Past Relationship(s), Pregnancy, Sexual Content, Sibling Bonding, Sibling Incest, Slash, Substance Abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-02-07
Updated: 2018-07-28
Packaged: 2019-06-07 14:14:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 18
Words: 36,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15220946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starseed/pseuds/starseed
Summary: “I've had a pretty hard life for such an easy heart.” - Whiskeytown.





	1. Shooting Stars

**Author's Note:**

> *This story is from Taylor's POV.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“People, he thought, were as hungry for a sight of joy as he had always been—for a moment's relief from that gray load of suffering which seemed so inexplicable and unnecessary.” – Ayn Rand._

“Hey!” My eyes widened in mock horror as Zac lifted the last slice of bacon-mushroom Alfredo pizza from the tray and took a generous bite.

“What?” he asked around a doughy mouthful, swallowing loudly. “It was clear you weren’t going to eat it, and I sure as hell wasn’t gonna let it go to waste.”

“Maybe I was going to save it for later…” I countered, raising my eyebrows suggestively. “You know, for a midnight post-sex snack or something.”

Zac leaned across the table and fixed his gaze on mine, looking so remarkably somber that I very nearly fell for it and believed that something was actually wrong—that is, until I felt his fingers graze my knee and trail teasingly along my upper thigh. 

“I guess I should let you know that I don’t put out on the first date,” he said, making a show of slowly licking a stray trace of sauce from his lip simply because he knew that I was watching.

“I call bullshit,” I rasped, a heated blush rising to my cheeks as he found my erection and gave it a little squeeze, paying no mind to the fact that we were in a restaurant without the luxury of total privacy.

When my own wife touched me, I felt nothing, but with Zac, I never had that problem. Instead, he made me feel too many things at once. He knew exactly how to push my buttons, how to work me up and calm me down. In that moment, I was at his mercy and he was all too aware of it. 

“You’ll just have to wait and see,” he remarked with a sly grin, his brown eyes sparkling.

*** * * * * * * * * ***

After having dinner at a little Italian place that lived up to its reputation of offering the best brick-oven pizza in the state, we went to a drive-in movie. The closest theater was two hours away, but we didn’t mind traveling. In fact, that distance was nothing compared to the ten, sometimes twenty-hour drives that we were forced to make on tour. Plus, the farther we were from our respective homes, the less risk there was of being recognized.

We watched ‘Fried Green Tomatoes’ from the bed of Zac’s truck—well, _he_ watched it, anyway. To be honest, my mind wasn’t on the film at all. As the story unfolded on the sprawling screen, I flipped through a much more pivotal story—the story of _us_.

Maybe six months isn’t much of a milestone for most couples, but it was huge for us. Every day ended with a question mark that hinged on the ever-present fear that somehow, the world would discover our secret. 

Now, I wasn’t delusional—I knew we were no longer the high-profile pop icons that we were back in the 90s—but I also wasn’t naïve enough to think that two semi-famous brothers caught in an incestuous affair could _not_ make national news. As frustrating as my marriage was, I couldn’t stand the thought of Natalie discovering the true depths of my depravity from a gossip column or a loose-lipped acquaintance. And as for our kids… well, my only wish was that they grew up to be happy and healthy adults, untouched by the darkness that followed me around like a ghost with unfinished business. 

Admittedly, my depression had eased up a lot since my relationship with Zac had leveled out. Sure, I still had bad days, but who doesn’t? Sometimes it was impossible to not get overwhelmed by the odds stacked against us. But then there were other times—like tonight—when I was reminded of how truly lucky I was to have him. Turning my head to the side, I watched the flickering lights from the screen dance across his eyes like shooting stars. He smiled and laced his fingers through mine, moving in even closer beneath the blanket that covered us.

I placed my free hand on the nape of his neck, drawing his mouth toward mine. Our lips bumped together, once, twice, three times as we both wavered between being led and leading. He looked so beautiful, his strong jaw catching traces of dusty moonlight, strands of long hair spilling out from beneath the baseball cap that I insisted he wear _just in case_.

“Happy anniversary,” he whispered before deepening the kiss, inviting me to fall right into it. 

It was a dreadfully hot summer evening—the sort of hopelessly humid night that will close in and suffocate you if you let it.

But I had never felt more free.


	2. The Woods

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“There is no point in hurrying because you are not actually going anywhere. However far or long you plod, you are always in the same place: in the woods. It’s where you were yesterday, where you will be tomorrow. The woods is one boundless singularity. Every bend in the path presents a prospect indistinguishable from every other, every glimpse into the trees the same tangled mass. For all you know, your route could describe a very large, pointless circle. In a way, it would hardly matter.” – Bill Bryson._

I was so used to constant motion, to always being on the go, that I scarcely knew how to relax. As life wore on, I convinced myself that it was better that way. That I wasn’t meant to be idle, because the moment I stepped back and found some breathing space and allowed myself to take that forbidden, liberating breath, I ran the risk of letting in unwanted feelings. 

Despite—or quite possibly _because of_ —my past addictions and my penchant for falling into temptation’s deceptive embrace, I was obsessed with being in control. But Zac was slowly but surely teaching me how to loosen my hold on the reins. He was guiding me by way of baby steps, much like an experienced skier might coax a newbie down the bunny slope, but I didn’t mind the pace. In fact, I loved that he cared enough to want to help me, that he didn’t judge me for not always knowing how to help myself. 

“We won’t fall apart if you take a few hours off, Tay,” were the calm words he spoke when he saw that my nerves were shot after one too many sleepless nights. 

He recognized the warning signs; he understood quite possibly better than I did when I was fast approaching that familiar breaking point. As much as I hated to leave the studio mid-session, he was right. My band, my family, the universe at large wouldn’t crumble as I cruised with one hand on the steering wheel, the other one clutching a cup of half-caf coffee, trying to reset. Sometimes, I navigated the streets of Tulsa aimlessly, no real direction in mind. On other days, I never even left the parking lot but reclined the seat as far back as it would go, my eyes closed in quiet meditation. And when I returned, Zac greeted me with a smile so genuine and beaming that I had no choice but to believe in it.

But there were certain things I was still having trouble believing.

For instance, could we really get away with spending an entire night alone together? We weren’t on tour, there were no other pressing work obligations that called for longer than usual studio hours, and our wives were pregnant. Therefore, we went above and beyond stretching the truth and resorted to good old-fashioned lying.

As far as Natalie was concerned, I was spending the night at a hotel in downtown Oklahoma City because some friends were playing a show and insisted that I attend the after-party. I caught telltale hints of disappointment in her eyes—she always hated my choosing social outings over “family time,” especially when I failed to extend an invitation to her—but after a few brief moments, she pasted a smile onto her glossy lips and clasped her hands around her slightly swollen belly as if to remind herself to count her blessings.

Zac, however, had a much more difficult time getting off the hook with Kate. Not only was his wife more intolerant and inherently suspicious than mine was, she was also a hell of a lot closer to her due date, meaning that she could be an insufferable bitch any time she pleased and get away with it. Most people didn’t dare cross her even when she wasn’t prone to hormone-induced bouts of rage, but they _really_ kept their distance once she reached the seven-month mark. Somehow, though, he earned her permission to accompany me to OKC (thankfully, Isaac was in Florida visiting his in-laws, otherwise he too would have tried to tag along on our fictitious outing).

Most of the time, I really didn’t like to think about the hold Kate had on my brother. Maybe I should have been more understanding—after all, the poor woman was being cheated on, and I was partially to blame—but I couldn’t bring myself to take pity on her. She constantly demeaned him, treating him like he was no smarter or more capable than their children, and it infused me with a rage unlike any other. Sometimes, I wanted to back her wiry frame up against a wall and scream that if she hated him so much, maybe she should just leave. Maybe they could both have a shot at real happiness that way. 

But I never acted on my angry thoughts. It was Zac’s battle to fight, not mine, and while I desperately desired to shield him from the heartless blows she sent his way, there was a deep-seated part of me that knew he would be lost without her. As miserable as his marriage was, it was the only world he knew, and I couldn’t bear the thought of upsetting that balance and taking it all away from him. Still, there were days when Kate flashed her signature smile that was just as falsely saccharine and sickening as those godforsaken sugar substitutes that Natalie dumped into her morning cup of tea, when I wanted nothing more than to send my fist crashing through her dainty rows of starch-white teeth.

“Taylor.” Zac’s rich, melodic voice pulled me from my reverie.

“Yeah?”

“The movie’s over.” He brushed a few locks of hair away from my temple before resting his forehead against mine. “Not a big fan of ‘Fried Green Tomatoes,’ are you?”

“No, it’s not that. I’m sorry. I just started thinking, and I guess I got carried aw—”

He cut me off with a long kiss, his lips spicy and sweet like cinnamon candy. Tracing my jawline with his index finger, he said, “You never have to apologize for who you are. Not to me.”

*** * * * * * * * * ***

“Zac,” I gasped as he tugged my jeans down my hips in a calculated, seamless motion. 

After slowing his truck to a stop on the gravel drive, he wasted no time in letting me know exactly what he wanted—which was, apparently, to go down on me in the parking lot of our secret hideaway. 

“You know, if we go inside, we’ll have an entire bed to ourselves,” I managed to rasp out as his mouth left my navel and ventured downward.

“Beds are overrated. And besides…” He paused briefly to let his tongue swipe across the tip of my erection, drawing a husky cry from between my parted lips. “I can’t wait. I want you _now_.”

With that, he descended on my length in earnest, murmuring in pleasure when I bumped gently against the back of his throat. His sense of what I wanted—no, what I _needed_ —never ceased to amaze me. He was more in tune with my emotions than the woman I’d been married to for more than a decade. He knew how to work me up into a spine-tingling crest of passion, and when it was over, he eased me down with care, handling our love like it was a colossal soap bubble. Its gleaming intensity was a stunning sight to behold, but we both knew how fragile it was, how quickly it might shatter. 

He settled into a borderline excruciating rhythm, and before long I was trembling, weaving my fingers through his hair and prompting him to look up at me.

“Close?” he asked, his palm splayed out along my upper thigh, excitement pouring from his eyes.

“Mmm, yeah.” My breathless response fell perfectly in sync with my climax and Zac was ready. He lapped up every last trace of my release and then lifted himself up to kiss me, his biceps straining in such a beautiful way that I almost grew hard again.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” he spoke through a soft chuckle as I melted into his embrace, safe in a cocoon of post-orgasmic bliss. “There’s somewhere else I’d like to take you.”

“Oh, really? And where might that be?” I pulled back and stared at him curiously.

He was silent as he licked his swollen lips, his eyes locked with mine. Then he leaned down, his teeth grazing my earlobe as he whispered, “Have you ever had sex in the woods before?”

*** * * * * * * * * ***

Zac strode purposefully toward a secluded wooded area behind our cabin, the blanket from the back of his truck slung around his shoulders like a cape. I laughed and shook my head as I trailed behind him, hardly able to believe that I’d been persuaded into partaking in something so reckless, so very dangerous. Then again, come to think of it, there wasn’t much that he couldn’t talk me into doing.

After spreading the afghan across a shadowed bed of grass, he playfully tackled me to the ground. For a moment, I was thrown back to our childhood, to all of those times we wrestled on our bedroom floor until the loser gasped for air and begged for mercy. If I looked deeply into his eyes, I could find his age in them, could spot almost twenty-seven twinkling stars like candles on a birthday cake. How was I lucky enough to have found someone I already knew so well, both inside and out? 

We undressed each other beneath the moon’s diffusing light, but he caught my arm before I tossed his jeans aside in order to pull a small bottle from the back pocket. 

“For someone who ‘doesn’t put out on the first date,’ you sure came prepared,” I joked.

He simply bit his lip and smiled, uncapping the lube and coating himself with layers of smooth liquid. My cock stirred to attention once more as I watched him stroke himself, each self-assured flick of his wrist a promise of what was to come.

God, I couldn’t wait to feel him. We didn’t get to do this nearly enough. 

“Ready?” He dipped two fingers inside of me, the question a hot tickle against my collarbone. 

“Always,” I moaned as he lowered himself down on top of me. 

*** * * * * * * * * ***

Once we were both spent, he rolled onto his back and folded his arms behind his head, sighing contentedly. I followed suit, marveling at how clear the midnight sky was above the sprawling canopy of trees. Nothing came close to the feeling of being one with him. I wasn’t a very spiritual person back then, but there was something about the way our bodies moved together that evoked the sense of a higher power, that made me _want_ to believe. Life had a way of unhinging me, of making me feel so very lost and alone, but when I was with Zac, things clicked back into place and made sense again.

“I hate to be a buzzkill, but can I ask you something?” Zac shifted on his side to face me, his brown eyes shining like freshly polished copper in the moonlight.

“Sure.”

“When you first…” he cleared his throat roughly, a crimson blush coloring his cheeks.

“When I first…?”

“When you first started… thinking about me as more than just a brother…” He stopped again mid-sentence, tilting his head pensively. “You said you were sixteen, right? Had you ever been with anyone else?”

“No,” I replied. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, it’s just that… you were a hell of a lot more experienced when something eventually _did_ happen between us, and I can’t imagine that I lived up to your fantasies.”

My screeching peal of laughter caused him to frown, and it was then I realized that despite how good he was at reading me, he wasn’t telepathic. I took his hand in mine, bringing it to rest against my wildly beating heart. 

“Feel that? That’s all because of you.” I pressed my lips against his knuckles with a smile. “You’re the best I’ve ever had.”

As we kissed, surrendering once more to our desires, I was vaguely aware of the distant crunching of leaves. But by the time we surfaced, flushed and sated, utterly consumed by one another, the sound had been reduced to a mere echo on my memory’s periphery.


	3. Light

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“It was morning. Some of the sky was yellow, some the softest blue. One small cloud scuttled along. Strange how everything below can be such death and chaos and pain while above the sky is peace, sweet blue gentleness.” – Shannon Hale._

I woke up sheathed in darkness, having no trouble adjusting to the light because there was none to adjust to. Yet I felt surprisingly rested, drenched in the satisfying calm of a good night’s sleep. Feeling far too lazy to power on my phone to check the time, I resituated myself between the sheets and, in doing so, caught sight of the blackout curtains we’d purchased a week ago, the rippled drapes hanging almost majestically across my line of vision.

When a bird chirped a long and cheery note outside the window, letting me know that it was likely morning despite the total blackness that surrounded us, I felt Zac move beside me without waking. He furrowed his brow and expelled a few languid breaths, his chest rising and falling in a soothing rhythm.

The curtains were among the few personal touches we’d recently added to our little cabin in the woods. Plus, as Zac so candidly pointed out, they helped keep me sane. He knew the crippling depths of my insomnia—that sometimes, the only way I could sleep at all was by tricking my mind into thinking it was past midnight even though the sun was in full bloom, beaming its fiery rays across the sky. So one night, after sneaking away from our wives and engaging in a toe-curling round of sex, we’d collapsed onto the couch with Zac’s new MacBook and bought some things to make the place feel less like a generic getaway and more like a home away from home. 

We also decided to frame several of Zac’s paintings along with a couple of my black-and-white photographs to hang on the walls of the condo. It wasn’t much—it wasn’t like we dropped thousands of dollars at IKEA and Crate & Barrel like Natalie and Kate were known to do—but it was more than enough for us.

He stirred again, securing his grip around my torso as he shifted. I smiled and basked in the simple warmth of his touch, glad that I could still find joy in sleeping next to someone else. I worried that ten years of marriage had killed my desire to share a bed with anyone, but thankfully, that wasn’t the case with Zac. 

Comparing Zac to Natalie always left me with a truly sick feeling in my gut, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself from doing it. My wife greeted each new morning with wide eyes and staunch determination, prepared to respond to a fire if she had to. She was typically in bed before midnight, oblivious to the fact that just because my eyes were closed didn’t mean that I was actually asleep. I didn’t usually fall into the arms of slumber until dawn (which was bad enough), but there were nights when I didn’t sleep at all. During the days that followed, my patience was as thin as a fine layer of ice on a river, leaving me to wonder if and when I’d crack. 

But if Natalie noticed me struggling, twisting and turning next to her in an endless bid for peace, she never showed it. She hardly gave me enough time to lift my head from the pillow before detailing the day’s events and inundating me with an overwhelming list of duties—both hers and my own. Maybe I should’ve been thankful to have such an attentive and responsible wife but instead, I longed for pure silence and just a few more hours of precious shut-eye.

Zac, on the other hand, gave me exactly what I needed. Although the occasions were few and far between, it was so nice to fall asleep beside him and not have to worry about waking up to a host of demands and expectations. If our schedule allowed it, he let me sleep in as long as I liked—as a matter of fact, he encouraged it by drawing the covers up around us like a cocoon, his body pressed firmly against mine. Of course, my relationship with Zac came with its own unique set of fears and concerns, but they were things I could mostly overlook when we were together. 

As my thoughts continued to wander, I asked myself what time it was, but I didn’t really want to know the answer. When I was with Zac, I preferred to believe that time didn’t exist at all. But sadly, we couldn’t stay in the cozy confines of our bedroom forever. I promised Nat that I’d be home by noon at the latest to see the new Pixar movie ‘Brave’ with her and the kids.

A tickle of breath against my lips brought me back, and I glanced up to find Zac’s mouth delightfully close to my own. He kissed me slowly, almost sweetly, his fingers threading through strands of my hair that weren’t quite long enough to tuck behind my ears. Having abandoned our clothes in the living room the night before, the sheet was the only thing that covered us, and it wasn’t long before that too was gone, reduced to a discarded tangle at the foot of the bed. 

“I want you,” he murmured, his voice washing over my collarbone with husky certainty.

“Are you sure about that?” I teased, rolling both of us over so that he was pinned beneath me, his back against my chest. Once I’d positioned us both to my liking, I sat up and ran my palms all the way from his broad shoulders to his slim hips, stopping just before I reached the tempting curve of his ass. “I thought maybe you’d rather be sleeping…”

“Did you not get the memo?” he managed breathlessly, the question slightly muffled by the pillow. “I always want you.”

A swell of passion surged through me then, and for a fleeting instant, it was as though the pitch-black room was bathed in colorful light, an almost tangible reflection of all that I felt for him. A luminous ribbon of gold danced along his spine, unraveling like a secret and spilling into my open hands. I needed to feel him. These stolen moments were never enough, but they were all we had.

Reaching for the small bottle by the bedside, I coated myself with liquid before inching my index finger into him. With his low, shuddering sighs and desperate thrusts against the mattress, it was clear that he was as insanely aroused as I was. 

“How do you want me?” I pressed my lips to the nape of his neck and added another finger, tracing patterns on his bicep with my free hand.

“Just like that,” he moaned. “God, Taylor, please…”

That was all it took for me to come undone completely. I told myself to go slowly, to soak up every sight and sound and feeling and the way our bodies moved together, but it was over much too soon. As I drifted down from that wonderful, heady cloud of bliss, I planted a line of kisses down his sweat-slick spine and then pulled open the thick curtains to let the light in.

*** * * * * * * * * ***

_Who am I to say I want you back?  
You were never mine to give away  
I was waiting for a long, long time for you to feel the same  
Who are you to look at me like that?  
Is there something more you need to say?  
I haven't loved you in a long, long time  
so why do I feel this way?_

_Can you hear my heartbeat?  
Please don't stand so close to me  
Can you hear my heartbeat still beating strong? _

_Maybe I'm ashamed to want you back  
Maybe I'm afraid you'll never stay  
Thought I hated you a long, long time  
There was my mistake_

_I just can't pretend that nothing's changed  
Can you comprehend just what to say?  
If you break my heart a second time  
I might never be the same…_

“What _is_ this shit?” Zac wrinkled his nose as the song I selected from my iPod blared through the speakers of his truck during our drive back from Daylight Donuts, where we’d shared a greasy breakfast of sausage rolls and cream-filled pastries. 

“It’s Alex’s new band. Their record’s due out in a few weeks, I think, but he sent me an advance copy.” 

“Oh, right.” Zac nodded in a show of vague recollection before adjusting his grip on the steering wheel. “What do they call themselves again? Jisms?”

I laughed, spewing a heaping mouthful of coffee all over my lap in the process. Thanks to our brief but tantalizing make-out session in a virtually deserted corner of the parking lot, my drink had some time to cool off, but I wasn’t thrilled about the muddy stain spreading swiftly across the crotch of my jeans. 

“ _JJAMZ_ ,” I corrected.

He waved his hand through the air dismissively. “Whatever. The name still sucks.”

“I can’t argue with you there, but the music itself is pretty decent,” I said, scrubbing at my pants with a wad of napkins in a halfhearted attempt to mop up the spill. “They’re playing at the Compound later this month.”

“Do you think you’re gonna go?”

I fiddled absently with the volume knob as the song filled the silence. Now that Alex and I were on speaking terms again, I didn’t see the harm in going to the show. With the way the music industry was these days, I knew how hard it was to launch a successful side project. My involvement in Tinted Windows proved that diehards will be diehards (I had no doubt that certain fans would always travel hundreds of miles to see me perform simply because I was Taylor Hanson—it really didn’t matter which group I was a part of), but it also served as a wake-up call of sorts. After being in a band with such a fiercely loyal fan base for so many years, I’d forgotten what it was like to have to _earn_ people’s interest and respect, that not everybody knew who I was. It was amazing to get to work with so many other talented musicians, but it was exhausting to feel like I had to prove myself day after day, night after night. 

Alex and I hadn’t talked much since my ‘bachelor’ party, but when he called me to tell me about the new album (and that Phantom Planet was on yet another indefinite break), I found myself sympathizing with him more than ever before. I knew what it was like to feel lost, like you’re constantly picking up handfuls of sand only to watch each grain slip right back through your fingers, like the only world you’ve ever known has been tipped upside-down and may never be set right again. 

“Yeah, I thought we could all go… you, me and Ike, I mean,” I clarified. “I’m sure he’ll put us on the list.”

“What an honor.” Zac rolled his eyes before lifting his drink from the cup holder and draining the last of its contents.

“What’s with all the negativity?” I cast a sideways glance in his direction. “Aren’t you guys friends now?”

As far as I knew, they’d been texting each other on and off ever since our trip to L.A. In fact, I was willing to bet that my brother spoke to Alex on a much more regular basis than I did. 

Zac shrugged. “We’re not enemies, but I’m not about to get a matching bro tat with him or anything.”

I chuckled again. “I sure hope not.”

“Why’s that?” His lips molded into a frown of mock offense. “You don’t think I’d look hot with a tattoo?”

“I didn’t say that, did I?” I replied with a sly grin, sliding my hand onto his thigh and giving it a squeeze. “All I meant was if you get a matching ‘bro tat’ with anyone, it better be me.”


	4. Parasite

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Marriage isn't a love affair. It isn't even a honeymoon. It's a job. A long hard job, at which both partners have to work, harder than they've worked at anything in their lives before. If it's a good marriage, it changes, it evolves, but it does on getting better. But a bad marriage can dissolve in a welter of resentment and acrimony. And it's never one person's fault. It's the sum total of a thousand little irritations, disagreements, idiotic details that in a sound alliance would simply be disregarded, or forgotten in the healing act of making love.” - Rosamunde Pilcher._

“You gonna finish that?” Zac leaned in until our arms touched, his fork poised mere millimeters above the massive slab of steak on my plate. 

I shook my head. “Nope. It’s all yours if you want it.”

“You know I always want your meat,” Zac murmured in my ear, his voice just loud enough for me to hear him without letting the rest of the table in on our secret.

It was rare for the six of us—Isaac, Zac and I along with our respective wives—to go out together given how crazy our lives were, but our schedules that summer were fairly relaxed compared to years past, allowing us an unusual amount of downtime. So at Ike’s eager insistence, Zac and I agreed to a triple date at Redrock Canyon Grill, which I also liked to call a carnivore’s paradise. 

I rolled my eyes at the cheesy line, feeling a smile of amusement tug at my lips as he attacked the rest of my ribeye. I should have known better than to order a huge, expensive steak that I surely wouldn’t finish, but I couldn’t deny how much I enjoyed watching Zac all but lick my plate clean, his tongue darting out to lap up stray drops of Worcestershire sauce from his bottom lip. Kate, however, seemed far less entertained by her husband’s voracious appetite. In fact, she looked downright pissed off, her perfectly manicured eyebrows narrowed as she glared across the table at Zac in an accusatory fashion, her hands clasped over her immensely swollen belly as though to remind herself why she put up with him. 

I swilled the red wine around in my glass before taking a hearty gulp. Since Nat and Kate were pregnant, and Zac still refused to so much as touch alcohol in his wife’s presence, Ike, Nikki and I were the only ones drinking that night. We’d already killed a bottle of Cab and were working our way through a second, the pleasant buzz flowing through my veins making the obvious tension between Zac and Kate a bit easier to tolerate.

Isaac was clearly just as intoxicated as I was, which I could tell by the glazed-over, faraway look in his eyes and the goofy grin he sported as he leaned in and left several wet, sloppy kisses on his wife’s flushed cheek. Their overt displays of affection would have sickened me on a normal day, but on that particular evening, it actually physically hurt to watch them engage so effortlessly, so _happily_. 

Zac and I would never be able to broadcast our feelings for one another like that—not in Tulsa or in any public place—and while I had more or less come to terms with that fact, it was a bitter pill to swallow when other couples shamelessly flaunted their love right in front of my face. 

“You know, it wouldn’t kill you to take a page from your brother’s book,” Kate remarked, her voice pulling me from the depths of my internal pity party. 

“Huh?” Zac asked through loud crunches on the ice cubes he’d just tipped into his mouth.

“Taylor understands the concept of eating only when he’s hungry,” she continued coolly. “He doesn’t need to devour everything in sight just for the hell of it, unlike some people.”

“Hey, that was a thirty-dollar steak!” Zac shot back. “You can’t blame me for wanting to enjoy it.”

“Whatever. I personally think it’s disgusting,” she spat. “Your four-year-old son even has better table manners than you do.” 

It wasn’t uncommon for our family to poke fun at each other’s eating habits—in fact, people loved pointing out how much Zac adored eating and conversely, how much I seemed to hate it—but the comments were mostly made in jest and came from a place of love. But Kate’s tone was harsh and biting, possessing not a single shred of playful warmth, and it sucked the color swiftly from my brother’s face like a parasite, like something that wanted to destroy him.

Even Natalie (who had to have been used to her best friend’s propensity toward bitchiness by that point) looked entirely taken aback by her outburst. My wife straightened up in her seat and ran a hand through her hair, letting out a forced little laugh; and then, realizing that her actions hadn’t eased the awkwardness at all but had only added to it, she grabbed Kate’s arm and helped her out of her chair, excusing them both from the table.

“What was that all about?” Ike asked as he watched the two women take off toward the bathroom, finally noticing that something was amiss.

“No fucking clue.” 

I shifted in my chair to face Zac, prepared to offer him my wine glass as a paltry consolation, only to find that he was gone.

*** * * * * * * * * ***

Zac was stretched out along the bed of his truck with his arms folded behind his head, his dark eyes blazing with broken shards of moonlight. I hoisted myself up and over the side, my alcohol-induced haze numbing the force of impact as I landed gracelessly beside him. 

“I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” he said, sounding every bit as lost as he looked. 

“Do what?” I scooted in closer so that my jean-clad hip bumped into his.

“Pretend to be happy in this fucking charade of a marriage,” he clarified. “I really think I hate her, Tay.”

I brushed a few strands of hair off of his forehead and let my hand linger there for a few long moments, feeling the soft thud of his pulse beneath my fingers.

“But she hates me too, you know?” He breathed out a sigh, his eyes falling closed as I continued rubbing slow, soothing circles by his temples. “She gets mad when I’m away for too long, but the minute I step through the front door, all she does is complain. She’s been on my case constantly for not helping out around the house or cooking for her, so a few days ago, I woke up early, scrubbed all the bathrooms until they were spotless and then made a huge breakfast for her and the kids. She barely even glanced at her plate of bacon, eggs and pancakes before dumping the whole thing in the trash.” 

“Wow. It’s that bad?”

He nodded wearily, opening his eyes to reveal glossy tears that didn’t fall but sparkled like freshly waxed windowpanes—like if I looked closely enough, I might have been able to see right through him. 

“Trust me, her fun little display at dinner tonight was _nothing_ compared to the shit that goes down at home. It’s like she doesn’t care about keeping our arguments even remotely private anymore. Hell, she sometimes tears me down right in front of Shep and Junia…” 

He rested his head on my shoulder then, expelling a strangled breath that sounded much more like a sob than a simple, routine scattering of air. 

“Most people who are this miserable in a marriage would have called it off years ago… but divorce isn’t an option. Not for us. Not when she’s about to give birth to our third child,” he said, shaking his head morosely. “I know I’m stuck in this and just have to find a way to deal, but that doesn’t stop me from thinking about ending it all the fucking time.”

The note of defeat in Zac’s tone was as thick as the oppressive Oklahoma summer heat draped like heavy curtains all around us. I felt the crushing weight of sadness on my chest like it was my own… and in a way, wasn’t it? I had always clicked more with Zac than with anyone else, had always been so closely tied to him, had always wanted to protect him, even though I was usually the one who needed saving. 

But I didn’t know how to protect him from this… from _her_. His relationship with Kate was something I never even pretended to understand. Everyone knew that my marriage was based on having foolish, unprotected sex when I was too young to fully comprehend the inevitable consequences. But Zac was with Kate for _years_ before they even started having sex. Did he propose to her because he was tired of feeling the suffocating pressure closing in from every angle? Because it seemed like the right thing to do at the time? Because he felt he had no choice but to follow in my footsteps and choose a long, exhausting life of duty over love?

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered into his hair, absurdly close to tears myself at the thought that _I_ had somehow helped drag him down into this dark, depressing place. 

“Not your fault,” he mumbled, his lips vibrating against my neck. 

Our mouths met in a desperate exchange, his teeth sinking into my bottom lip as our kisses grew more forceful and frantic. I longed for the ability to take away his pain, but I knew that was impossible, that I couldn’t truly suck the poison out from such deep and unseen wounds—that the best I could do was to simply be there for him and show him that I gave a damn.

“I love every single inch of you,” I murmured, dragging the pads of my fingers across the exposed patch of tanned skin on his stomach, playing with the soft tufts of hair below his navel.

I wasn’t even trying to be overly sexual with him (at least, not at first), but things progressed that way naturally, as they so often did with us. And before I knew it, my hand was slipping beneath the waistband of his jeans and I was running my tongue along the sensitive spot right below his ear that he never could resist. 

“We shouldn’t… not here,” Zac protested weakly.

“Why not? It’s not like anyone can see us,” I pointed out, lowering the zipper and flicking my thumb across the evident bulge in his boxer briefs.

“Because our wives could come looking for us at any minute… oh, fuck,” he gasped, arching his hips up into my open palm once I had pushed aside the fabric of his underwear. 

“I don’t want to think about them right now. I just want to make you feel good,” I said, closing my fist around his erection and feeling him pulse and tremble from the sudden contact. 

It didn’t take long at all for him to reach the edge, and when he placed his hand over my own, prompting me to pump him even faster, I knew just how ready he was to _let go_ of all the pent-up frustration and rage steepling to a fiery crescendo inside of him.

“God, Tay,” he whimpered breathlessly.

“Yeah? Are you close?”

“So close,” he moaned, just seconds before throwing his head back and shuddering in the throes of a quiet, albeit violent climax. 

After using the threadbare blanket beneath us to wipe away the evidence, we curled up in the bed of his truck and kissed for awhile. Zac seemed infinitely more relaxed than before, the movement of his lips slow and languid as they met mine again and again, as though he suddenly had not a care in the world. 

_If only life were that simple, and we really could be allowed to live in our own blissful little world, happily ever after…_

A sharp buzzing sound sliced through the lazy silence, causing us to sit up and fumble for our cell phones. The particular pair of jeans I had on that day made it extremely difficult for me to free the device from the confines of my pocket, and it was no surprise that Zac beat me to it, his brow furrowing as he squinted down at his iPhone.

“Did you just get a text from Alex?” he asked.

“I sure did,” I replied once I finally had my phone in hand. 

The name **Alex Greenwald** flashed across the screen in bold letters, along with a brief message that he’d apparently just sent to both of us:

_Just touched down at TUL. Where my boys at?_


	5. The Hours

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and you get through that one and then, my God, there's another. I'm so sick.” - Michael Cunningham._

It was just after 11PM when the three of us claimed seats at the upstairs bar at McNellie’s, Alex wedging his tall, lanky body between Zac and me like he couldn’t bear the thought of not having direct contact with us both. 

“So, pray tell, how did you manage a night away from your precious females?” Alex asked, leaning back in his chair with his Jack and Coke in hand as he shifted his gaze between us.

“Believe it or not, we owe it all to our dear older brother,” Zac admitted through a frothy mouthful of beer. 

“It’s true,” I agreed after taking a long swig of my own drink. “We were in the middle of an epically shitty family dinner when we got your text, and I figured there was no way in hell we could bail, but once I mentioned that you were in town, Ike started singing your praises.”

Curiosity morphed into skepticism as Alex tipped a few ice cubes into his mouth, crunching them loudly while motioning for me to continue.

“He said you’ve been a great friend to us… that you always play ‘host’ to us whenever we’re in L.A., and it was only fair that we do the same for you and meet you at the airport. It was pretty obvious that he was talking out of his ass the whole time, but our wives seemed to buy the story—or at least, they didn’t care enough to challenge it,” I finished, purposefully leaving out the part where Kate had rolled her eyes and referred to Alex as a “washed up, coked-out loser who looks more like a homeless man than a rock star.”

“How nice of them to be so… accommodating,” Alex remarked with a smirk.

I knew he was only joking, but his sarcastic tone hit me with surprising force, causing me to drop my eyes from his to the tabletop, where I chipped away at the jagged wooden edge with my fingernail. Things between Zac and me had been going so well lately, but there was a darkness lurking just beneath the surface of unmatched bliss, preventing me from getting too comfortable. We were playing with fire, after all—we’d gotten into a dangerous routine of balancing our relationship alongside our need to act out the expected roles as husbands, sons and fathers—but it was only a matter of time before we both got burned. 

And yet, that was a risk we were willing to take. In fact, sometimes it felt like we were challenging the flames, spurring them on, encouraging them to make their approach and expose the huge, blazing truth of our love. 

“What brings you to Tulsa tonight, anyway?” I changed the subject, hoping to realign my drifting train of thought. “I thought your show wasn’t until Friday?”

“I missed you guys,” Alex replied with a shrug. “I know you think L.A. is the shit—and most of the time, it is—but… I don’t know. The band I put so much of my fucking heart and soul into is on another _break_ , and now that Sam’s getting hitched, I doubt we’ll ever make music together again. And yeah, JJAMZ is a nice distraction, but when I’m not rehearsing with those guys, my life is honestly pretty fucking boring. So I thought, why not head down to T-Town a few days early and shake things up a little?”

While his speech was delivered in his usual nonchalant fashion, I caught a hint of raw sincerity in his voice that seared through his tough, unfeeling exterior, reminding me that he was _human_ , just like the rest of us. 

“If you’re looking for a wild night out, I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place,” I said, waving my hand through the mostly-deserted room. “The most traffic this place ever gets is when we invite our fan club members to town for the weekend… and believe me, that’s not really your scene. Not unless you’re into groups of thirty-year-old women following you around, snapping pictures of your every move.” 

“Believe _me_ , every night out with the two of you is a wild one… at least in my book,” he replied with a wink, polishing off the last of his cocktail. “But don’t feel like you have to babysit me or anything. My cousin Jacob lives in Oklahoma City now, so he said he’d take me bar-hopping tomorrow. You’re more than welcome to join us…”

The blaring ring of Zac’s cell phone interrupted the invitation, and it was then I realized that my brother had been almost eerily silent over the course of the last half-hour. Heaving an agitated sigh, he pressed the phone to his ear and mumbled a gruff greeting before rising from his seat and heading toward a dark, secluded corner of the bar. A few seconds later, the waitress stopped by to check on us, and I ordered another round for the table, figuring that we—especially Zac—would need it. 

“What’s his deal?” Alex asked, as we both watched Zac stuff his phone into his pocket and disappear into the bathroom. 

“His wife’s a bitch.”

“Ah.” He took a sip of his refill and nodded, as though my blunt statement explained everything. “You know, I really don’t know how you guys do it.”

I raised my eyebrows at him across the rim of my beer glass, silently prompting him to elaborate.

“Marriage, kids, the whole nine yards… I just don’t _get_ it,” he said. “I mean, I guess it makes sense for some people… take Sam, for instance. He’s head over heels for the woman he’s engaged to, and he actually _wants_ to spend every waking moment with her. And I suppose I even understand why _you_ did it. You were more or less forced into marrying Natalie, what with knocking her up and having to deal with a bunch of Bible-toters breathing down your neck—not to mention, you had your career to worry about. But why the fuck did Zac get married so young? It’s like he threw away the best years of his twenties just so some random spoiled brat could call herself his wife and bear his children, and make his life a living hell in the process.” He shook his head somberly. “Maybe I’m wrong… maybe there’s a lot more to the story that I’m not aware of… maybe deep down, he really does _love_ her. But it seems to me like he’s trapped, like he’s caught between searching for a way out and giving up completely. And what a fucking way to go, you know? At the end of the day, I want to be able to look back on my life and know that I lived it as a free man, not a prisoner.”

To say that I was shocked by Alex’s long-winded outburst would have been a vast understatement. In fact, I’m not sure I’d ever heard him talk that much or that candidly about anything… not unless you count the nights when we used to get high and spill our secrets to each other in the shadowed confines of his bedroom. But the most surprising thing of all was that his words echoed my very own thoughts—thoughts that I’d always been hesitant to voice because I didn’t want Zac to feel like I was judging him. Zac had stood by me faithfully through the years; he watched things fall apart time and again, but instead of laughing in my face and saying ‘I told you so,’ he helped me piece them back together, even though there were times when he probably wanted to do nothing more than slap me upside the head and call me an idiot. 

Because that’s what love is, in its purest form—it’s acceptance; it’s the ability to not only tolerate another person’s flaws, but to _embrace_ them. 

Maybe I didn’t understand why Zac had made certain, life-altering decisions—but I loved him nonetheless. And I was struck by a sudden, almost blinding desire to be near him, even though rationally I knew that he was just a few feet away.

“I’ll be right back,” I announced, pushing my chair back and standing.

But Alex wasn’t listening to me at all. He was gazing out the window with his chin resting in his palm, his eyes following a parade of strangers as they exited the bar and poured out into the street below, his mind somewhere else entirely.

*** * * * * * * * * ***

It was past midnight when I found Zac in an unlocked bathroom stall, sitting on the closed toilet lid as he stared blankly ahead of him. His eyes—eyes that knew how to cut right through me and see into my very core—were dark and vacant, detached from everything. I kicked the door closed behind me and leaned against it, watching his chest rise and fall, his full lips pulled into a frown.

“Remember when we were too young and stupid to know any better, and Ike convinced us that if people spent any more than five minutes in the bathroom, then they got flushed down the toilet and taken away to China, never to be seen again?” 

My seemingly out of the blue question piqued his interest just enough to elicit a wary nod, although he made no move to speak. 

“Well, this is just between us, but there’s still a part of me that believes in that insane theory. I wanted to be sure I hadn’t lost you,” I said, closing the space between us and pulling him into a standing position, drawing my arms around his waist. “I need you right here,” I murmured against his lips.

His soft chuckle was lost in a kiss, his mouth moving fervently against mine as he deepened the embrace. He clung to me almost desperately, his fingers finding their way to my belt loops and bringing me in even closer, and if I didn’t know any better, I would have thought that he was trying to disappear into me.

Maybe Alex was right, and he really was torn between escaping and admitting total defeat. There was definitely a war raging inside of him and it broke through his skin, making him look so much older than 26, making me feel so much older than 29. 

_If only we could erase all of our wasted hours and go back to being young again_ , I thought, tracing my thumb along his sculpted jaw, trying to ignore the creases around his eyes that looked too much like my own. 

I wanted to tell him that things would get better eventually, but how could I feed him all of that ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ crap when I didn’t truly believe in it? Sure, I believed in true happiness, but I also knew how hard it was to actually achieve it, despite how easy it seemed. People were always telling us that we had everything, and maybe they were right—after all, we were relatively successful, we got to do what we loved for a living, and we had more than enough money to fall back on if our career ever bit the dust. But our lives—or at least, _my_ life—was far from a walk in the park, even though it probably seemed ideal to outsiders looking in. Some days, like the ones I spent in the comfort of my brother’s arms, were genuinely perfect, but others sucked the will to live right out of me, like leeches fastened to my soul, eating away at a part of me that I could only feel, not see. And I was beginning to sense that Zac could relate to that feeling all too well. 

“So, is there a specific reason you’re hiding out in here, or did you just want to be left alone?” I asked, brushing a stray lock of hair from his forehead.

“I want a divorce,” he answered quietly.


	6. Shadows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles.” - Sylvia Plath._

Growing up in a family of practical jokers, I knew how to read people’s faces for signs that I was being tricked. I was especially good at searching Zac’s features for flecks of amusement in his eyes or the hint of a mischievous smirk on his parted lips. 

But in the dimly lit bathroom of McNellie’s, I found nothing but a dark and heavy sadness there, like a cloud filled to the brim with acid rain. His words crashed through the air like storm debris, disturbing the silence and making me grip his waist even more tightly in a vain attempt to keep him safe.

But how could I protect him from something that was so far out of my control? 

I drew in a deep breath and prayed for inspiration to strike, for a solution to magically find its way to me like it so often did when we were on tour or in the studio. Maybe my brothers didn’t always look to me for help, but nine times out of ten, I was the one who solved our problems. (Then again, I was usually the one who _caused_ them.) But there was nothing I could say or do to help Zac—not now. Maybe a stronger, wiser sibling would have told him that all marriages have low points but that he shouldn’t give up the fight; or maybe that sibling would have shaken his shoulders and told him to snap the fuck out of it. But I was neither strong nor wise, and all I could do was stare into his eyes, my own heart breaking when I once again noticed just how _old_ he looked.

Seized by a sudden spell of vertigo, I stepped away from him and lowered myself onto the closed toilet lid. It was as though I was waiting for something—but what? For him to take back what he’d said or laugh the whole thing off? No. Zac may have been unpredictable and impulsive at times, but he didn’t make huge, life-altering decisions without thinking them through. He didn’t snap. _I_ was the one who came unhinged without warning, who threw my fist through glass windows, who almost drove my car into a—

“Tay?” 

My name left his lips in a broken whisper; he sounded so very fragile, and he looked the part as well. Despite all the food I’d seen him practically inhale at dinner, his jeans sat frighteningly low on his hips, like they were just barely hanging on, and the skin that lined his rugged cheeks seemed much too close to the bone. I knew the signs of aging all too well; I faced them each and every time I dared a glance into the mirror, and oftentimes I had to talk myself out of smashing it to bits. But looking at Zac hurt even more than studying my own reflection. I didn’t want him to grow older than his years, to always wish he were a decade younger or that he could take it all back and start over. 

I didn’t want him to hate himself. 

“Did you even hear what I said?” he pressed, a note of frustration creeping into his tone.

“Yeah.” I let the word drop from the end of a troubled sigh, tugging my fingers through my hair. “And I get it… I know she doesn’t make you happy. But it’s just… divorce is big, Zac. It’s _so_ big, and it’ll change everything—not just for you, but for Junia and Shep, not to mention the baby on the way…”

“You think I don’t know that?” he cut me off quietly. “I know this is a big deal, and it scares the shit out of me, but I meant what I said in the parking lot. I really don’t think I can do this anymore. Life’s supposed to be about living, right? But when I’m with Kate, I feel like I’m dying.”

He shifted his gaze to the floor and coughed, trying to mask a sob, but I heard it anyway. It was like he was dry heaving without actually throwing up—he wasn’t crying, but he may as well have been, considering how miserable he was. 

“C’mere.” I reached out and gently took hold of his arm, coaxing him toward me. 

Zac rarely let anyone take care of him—he was independent, self-sufficient and stubborn to a fault—but in that moment, he all but collapsed into my lap and buried his head in my neck, his entire body shaking. Running my hands up and down his back, I breathed in his familiar scent, the intoxicating mixture of shampoo, sweat and cologne going straight to my head just like it always did. His fingernails dug into my forearms like they too were searching for an answer, making me ache right along with him, making me wish for the millionth time that I had one to give. 

A parade of loud, uneven footsteps broke through my reverie, causing me to freeze up. Had I latched the door behind me? I suddenly couldn’t remember. I suddenly didn’t even care. Two grown men—two _brothers_ , no less—embracing in a cramped bathroom stall had to have been a ridiculous sight for a curious onlooker, and if that curious onlooker happened to recognize us, I was sure that we were done for… but sometimes, I just got so damn tired of worrying about everything, of keeping the best part of my life under lock and key like it was some dark and dirty secret. And so instead of pushing Zac off of me and racing toward the door to ensure that it was locked, I pulled him in closer and tightened my arms around him, refusing to let him go. 

“You know I’m here for you,” I murmured, kissing the corner of his mouth. “Whatever you need.”

“I know,” he replied, his voice barely audible.

The footsteps slowed to a stop directly in front of the stall we were in, and the door swung open to reveal Alex, his tall frame towering high above us. He wasted no time in distributing the three shot glasses in his hands—each one nearly overflowing with clear liquid that looked like water but smelled like poison—before making a morbid toast.

“To the bastards who would rather hang out in the bar’s nasty-ass bathroom together than with the guest of honor,” Alex proclaimed, raising his drink in the air without making even the slightest attempt to hide his offended pout. “Cheers.”

Zac stood up, clinked glasses with Alex, and took his shot silently before reaching out for mine, downing the second one even more swiftly than the first. If the circumstances had been different, I might have been impressed by his ability to hold his liquor; but that night, all it did was remind me just how damaged he was. 

I’d been in his shoes before—God, I’d wasted so much time scouring all the wrong places for that light, that spark, for something to wake me up again. How many lines of coke or bottles of gin had it taken for me to realize that chemical fixes were only temporary… that they didn’t truly _fix_ anything? Every time the numbness wore off, I wound up feeling even more lonely and depressed than I had at the start. Ultimately, it was Zac who healed me, who taught me that I wasn’t incapable of loving, but that I simply hadn’t found the right person to love. 

He set both empty glasses by the sink and raked his fingers through his hair, his weary gaze avoiding the mirror at all costs. Several restless strands had come loose from a messy ponytail, hanging over his eyes like a veil, and I fought the urge to brush them away and press my thumbs tenderly into the shadows beneath his tired eyes in order to erase them, in order to memorize them. Even when drained and exhausted, he was the most beautiful person I had ever seen. I needed him more than the woman with whom I shared a bed and four (almost five) children. Did he know that he’d single-handedly changed my life? That he had saved me from myself? 

But before I could even blink, let alone voice my heated thoughts, he was gone, leaving Alex and me alone in the bathroom to exchange similarly dumbfounded looks. Thinking back, I shouldn’t have been surprised—Zac was known for his tendency to run away from life’s curve balls, even the ones he set in motion. 

I followed him back out into the bar, Alex trailing closely behind me, and together we watched him order a tall drink and positively attack it, like it was the first liberating taste of _anything_ that he’d been allowed in quite some time.

“Is he okay?” Alex asked.

I shook my head, the verbal answer dying in my throat when a man in a black hooded sweatshirt knocked into me roughly, spilling a midnight-colored cocktail down the length of my body. Instead of offering up an apology, the careless stranger made a beeline for the staircase and disappeared from view. 

“What the fuck?” I mumbled, feeling dazed as I stared down at the shards of broken glass at my feet.

“Who was that?” Alex echoed.

“No fucking clue…”

Once the initial shock from the collision had abated, I leaned back against the wall and felt a sharp, searing pain tear across my abdomen. Swallowing thickly, I closed my eyes and waited for the discomfort to subside… but it never did.

“Are _you_ okay?” Alex rested a hand on my shoulder, sounding unmistakably concerned. 

“Yeah,” I lied, taking in a deep breath as another wave of nausea washed over me. “But would you mind getting Zac and closing out the tab? I’m ready to get the hell out of here.” 

*** * * * * * * * * ***

We ended up at our cabin deep in the heart of the woods, where Zac seemed set on drinking himself into a stupor. He threw open the front door and headed straight for the liquor stash, and a few moments later, he emerged with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a bag of peanut M&Ms I didn’t recall ever having purchased. He slumped down onto the couch, patted the empty seat beside him and cast an imploring glance my way, wordlessly asking me to join him. But as much as I wanted to do exactly that—as much as I longed to be with him, to comfort him—I found that for some strange reason, I could hardly keep my eyes open. I’d tucked away a decent amount of alcohol that night, but I hadn’t had nearly enough to be on the verge of blacking out…

…Or had I?

“Why don’t you go take a shower?” Alex suggested, placing his palm against the small of my back as though he knew how badly I was struggling to stay upright. “I’ve got this.”

I nodded in what I hoped was a display of gratitude before stumbling toward the bedroom, willing myself to remain conscious long enough to strip off my clothes and settle into the bathtub. I didn’t know what had happened at McNellie’s, but something had changed, a deep-rooted fear rising up from within, and I needed to drown it… or at the very least, push it back down where it belonged.

After shrugging off my leather jacket, shedding my pants and discarding my stained button-down (I hated dressing for the summer, even in July), I made the mistake of steadying my dizzy gaze on the wall-length mirror, only to stagger backward and do a double take, my mouth falling open to release a horrified gasp.

There was a trail of bright red blood above the waistline of my boxers, a jagged incision running from my navel to my hip.


	7. Up, Up and Away

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“In a world gushing blood day and night, you never stop mopping up pain.” - Aberjhani._

Despite having four children and a half-dozen accident-prone siblings, I still couldn’t stand the sight of blood. In fact, it was all I could do not to vomit all over myself as I sat in the bathroom that night, watching the sickeningly bright drops of crimson fall from my torso and onto the pristine white tile beneath me. 

I hated to admit it, but Zac was much better at dealing with this sort of thing than I was. He was gentle and remarkably patient when it came to tending to the busted lips and skinned knees of not only his kids, but _mine_ as well. When Penny fell off the tire swing one summer and split her chin open, Zac wasted no time in sweeping her up and carrying her off to the house, telling her all sorts of embarrassing stories about me from our eventful childhood to distract her from the pain while he bandaged her up. When River got stung by a bee during a heated game of kickball with his cousins and proceeded to throw a tantrum whose likes I’d never seen in all my years of parenting, it was Zac who calmed him down, singing ‘The Ants Go Marching One By One’ in a purposefully off-key falsetto until my son’s eyes were shining with tears of laughter, not distress. And when I slipped the wedding band onto Natalie’s ring finger and got sucked into a downward spiral of sadness and regret, it was Zac who stopped me from hitting rock bottom. 

My natural instinct was to freak out and brace myself for the worst when things didn’t go as planned, but Zac was usually able to maintain a healthier perspective. _Life really isn’t all that bad_ , his vibrant eyes seemed to say as they caught mine.

At the very least, he almost always found a way to make me smile.

I wish that I could have done the same for him—that I could have been that unfailing pillar of strength he’d been for me more times than I could count—but as my luck would have it, I too was broken, rendered both physically and emotionally exhausted by what had happened to me at McNellie’s. I closed my eyes in a feeble attempt to stave off the nausea and was pulled back in time, back to the days when cutting lines and snorting were the closest I could get to finding peace. 

Alex, being well aware of how inexperienced I was in the thrilling yet dangerous world of drugs (I may have been certain people’s definition of a “rock star” back then, but I was still just barely nineteen, untainted by marriage and fatherhood, although both loomed menacingly on the horizon like heavy, leaden stormclouds that not even the most stubborn of us can escape), was sure to inform me of the variety of potential side effects, but I chose not to heed his warnings. At that point in time, a cocaine-induced nosebleed was the least of my problems. 

At least, that’s what I told myself until the night of a particularly wild party over a decade ago. My brothers tried to pry me away from the ravenous clutches of temptation, but I couldn’t be swayed. I had already set foot on the path to destruction and was determined to stop at nothing until I got there.

“C’mon, Tay,” Isaac had pressed, his forehead creased with concern. “It’s getting late, and I just had to practically force a wasted, bleach-blonde bimbo out of Zac’s lap and back into her clothes. Can we please just _go_?”

“Sure, you guys go on ahead… I’ll catch up with you later,” I had answered dismissively, waving him away. 

Sam passed me the bong and I took a nice, fat hit, feeling extremely pleased with myself when I exhaled a seamless stream of smoke without coughing. Ike might have rolled his eyes and flicked me off—he may have even lost his cool and mumbled a few obscenities, but I didn’t care that I had pissed him off. I didn’t care about _anything_ but getting high and losing myself in that blissfully altered state of non-being. 

Isaac gave up on trying to save me and headed back to the hotel with a dazed-looking Zac in tow, and in a matter of minutes, I was following Alex into his bedroom. We did one last line and then stripped down to our underwear, engaging in a vicious round of kissing that would have turned into something more if we hadn’t been blazed out of our minds. Alex’s lips were everywhere, his surprisingly strong arms anchoring me to the bed as he kissed a burning-hot path all the way from my mouth, to my navel and then back up again. When his teeth closed around my nipple, I cried out helplessly, the desperate sound fading into the hum of L.A. traffic sifting through the half-open window. And that was the last thing I remembered before passing out.

When Alex shook me awake several hours later, his voice thin and laced with drunken hysteria, I didn’t even know where I was at first, but I found the gritty clash of tires on asphalt and the distant wail of sirens to be oddly comforting. But that fleeting sense of tranquility vanished when I noticed that Alex’s hands and face were stained with blood, and that I was the culprit—the blood was pouring out of _me_. It was then that I started choking on the bitter, metallic liquid flowing from my nose into the back of my throat. 

Once Alex was coherent enough to untangle himself from the mess we’d made of the sheets, he stumbled out of the bedroom wearing only his boxer-briefs and a keen look of remorse. He returned with a large roll of toilet paper and a small trash can, and as I pinched the bridge of my nose while trying to mop up the blood, he held my hair back and instructed me to tilt my head forward to avoid swallowing any more of it.

After what felt like an eternity but was probably no more than an hour, my nose finally stopped bleeding and I relaxed against the pillows with a sigh. Alex settled in beside me, his arm draped loosely around my waist, and if I had dared look past the surface, I would have seen the unmistakable devotion etched into his dark eyes. But there was strong sense of melancholy there, too—it would have been much like staring into the eyes of a child who willingly released his hold on his favorite balloon just so it wouldn’t be ripped away by the everchanging wind or some other cruel and unseen force. 

The next morning, after a greasy and unsatisfying breakfast at IHOP, Alex let me go and I drifted up, up and away, into a life that had no place for him.

*** * * * * * * * * ***

“Food is the last thing I should be thinking about after watching Zac toss his cookies, but holy fuck, I’m _starving_. D’ya mind if I order a…”

Alex trailed off, his words dying in the air when he spotted me through the cabin’s bathroom doorway. I must have been far more drunk than I thought, because I truly had no idea how long I had been sitting there. The door was wide open and there was a neglected pile of gauze on the floor beside me, soaking up the blood that continued its alarmingly rapid descent from my midsection.

I vaguely recalled fishing through the cabinets under the bathroom sink for the paltry supply of ‘first aid’ products that Zac and I had purchased after an adventurous midnight romp in the woods, but anything I might have done after that was a mystery. I’d somehow managed to free a wad of thick gauze strips from the box, but I’d failed to apply them directly to the wound itself. 

Had I passed out? Was I actually seeing present-day Alex, or was this just a twisted delusion, the ghost of a bittersweet memory coming to life before my very eyes? 

I tried to blink his tall, skinny frame into focus but found that I couldn’t. The room wasn’t exactly spinning, but it was unnervingly unbalanced, set at a jarring angle that made my stomach lurch the way it did whenever an airplane dropped and tilted without warning. 

“My God,” Alex breathed, his voice cracking as he crouched down to study the incision. “What the hell happened to you?”

“Broken glass,” I offered hoarsely. 

As my surroundings slowly grew sharper and significantly clearer, I realized that I was no longer stuck inside of a disturbing reverie from ten years ago… no, instead I was trapped in an equally nightmarish reality. 

The calloused coolness of Alex’s fingers on my bare skin was so unexpected that it made me jump, my body slamming into the cabinets. The rough wood chafed my back as I collapsed against it, reminding me just how vulnerable I was. 

“Easy.” His tone was calm and measured, like he was speaking to a child. “Just let me take a look, okay?”

I sucked in a breath and nodded.

At first, his touch felt feathery and far-away, as though he were trying to coax me from the foggy depths of a dream. But the instant his wandering hand brushed against the waistband of my boxers, the pain morphed from a peripheral sensation into something real and palpable and altogether agonizing. The wound suddenly screamed for my attention and I scrambled to my feet with a start, my hip connecting with the pointed edge of the sink with enough force to leave a mark. 

“God damn,” I swore under my breath, struggling to regain my balance. 

When Alex’s palm came to rest on the small of my back, I tensed up immediately, tightening my grip on the polished marble ledge behind me. But he paid no mind to my skittish reaction. Seemingly unfazed, he plucked the light blue hand towel from its rack and turned the faucet on, running it beneath the water until it took on the color of a new bruise.

And then, he began to clean me up. 

“You don’t have to do this,” I nearly hissed as he dragged the towel across my lower stomach, growing dizzy again as I watched the blood spread through the sodden fabric like a cancer. “I've got everything under control.”

“Just this once, I really don’t think you do,” he replied softly, grabbing my elbow and guiding me into a seated position at the edge of the bathtub.

I sat down reluctantly, but only because I no longer trusted my legs to support my weight. Whether it was from blood loss, the sorry state of Zac’s life or my inadvertent trip down memory lane, my limbs had all but turned to jelly. I felt hazy and disoriented, like I’d been dissected only to have my organs and appendages reattached and sewn back up in all the wrong places.

“Well, _someone_ needs to help you, and it sure as hell ain’t gonna be your little brother—who, by the way, is puking up the rainbow in the kitchen as we speak,” Alex remarked, wringing the cloth out in the sink.

Once I had finished watching the strangely mesmerizing current of blood trickle down the drain, I shifted my gaze back to Alex, raising my eyebrows at him wearily. 

“After polishing off that entire bag of M&Ms, he found a pack of Skittles and fucking went to town. I tried to take it away from him, but he slapped me every single time I got too close. The next thing I knew, he was dumping handfuls of candy into his drink and guzzling them down… and, well, I’ll let you imagine the rest,” he said, a smirk playing around his lips as he wet the towel, knelt down in front of me and got back to work. 

Under normal circumstances, I would have been amused by the idea of Zac giving Alex a hard time—and I might have even cracked a smile at the thought of him “puking up the rainbow.” But in my weakened state, I couldn’t even bring myself to feign a grin. Plus, it wasn’t like Zac had decided to eat and drink himself sick on the grounds of sheer stupidity alone. His actions had clearly been fueled by an intense and crippling depression, the kind that leaves a huge, gaping hole in your heart no matter your attempts to fill it. 

It made my own heart ache for him. 

When the flow of blood eventually stemmed and clotted, Alex doused the wound in antiseptic and covered it carefully with gauze, as though he’d done this very thing a thousand times before.

“Well, that ought to do it,” he announced once he was finished, standing up to admire his handiwork. “It might not be a permanent solution, but it’s a damn good temporary fix, if I may say so myself.”

“Thanks,” I said sincerely, letting him pull me to my feet.

Truth be told, I was amazed by how well Alex had handled the situation. Although I had caught him sneaking a few glances at my naked body while I changed, he had at least pretended to avert his eyes as I slipped out of my ruined boxers and into one of the fresh pairs I kept in the top dresser drawer in the bedroom. 

_What does it matter, anyway?_ I thought. It wasn’t anything he hadn’t seen before.

The silence between us was shattered by the sound of Zac retching in the other room. I cringed as I made my way to the door, feeling my own stomach heave as the unpleasant noises intensified with each step that I took. 

“No, I’ll go check on him,” Alex said, touching my wrist to stop me. “If you go out there, you’ll probably just get end up getting sick, too—and believe me, the last thing I need is another spewing Hanson brother on my hands.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive. Oh, and Tay?” He came to a sudden halt, his hand poised just above the doorknob. “I hate to break it to you, but there’s no way that’s a cut from broken glass.” 

He then spoke the words that I’d been thinking all along but was too afraid to voice.

“It looks to me like you’ve been stabbed.”


	8. In the Gutter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“If given a knife and a hand in which to hold it, the mind would eventually eat itself. Not because it wanted to; because it did not want to.” - Stephen King._

Fifteen years of being in the spotlight meant that I had encountered a vast number of ‘crazies’ along the way. Hanson fans were notorious for overstepping boundaries, and as a result, my brothers and I caught shadows lurking around the premises of our homes from time to time. We’d even acquired a few stalkers from all around the globe and had been forced to issue restraining orders. But we had learned very early on that insanity simply came with the territory. When you’re famous—and when your audience is comprised mostly of obsessed teenage girls who watched you grow, who grew up with you—people tend to feel as though they know you.

Some even think that they’re entitled to a piece of you. Sure, it pissed me off when fans grabbed at my clothes with enough force to rip them off my body; and it really made my blood boil when they targeted Zac (my heart still aches at the memory of my twelve-year-old brother following closely behind me, grasping the back of my shirt in frantic fistfuls as hundreds of hungry hands tried to claim him). And admittedly, there were even times when I was scared—especially back when I was just a teenager myself, when the fame was still so new and my innocence was still intact.

But I never truly believed that my life was in danger.

I glanced down at my bandaged torso and felt a chill move down my spine, as cold and unforgiving as ice water. After that mysterious stranger spilled his drink all over me in McNellie’s, the glass had shattered at my feet almost instantly. There was no way in hell that a random shard could have pierced my abdomen; gravity alone made sure of that. 

_If only I had been paying attention_ , I thought, tugging a hand through my hair anxiously. If only I had picked up on even just a few of the man’s features… but I had absolutely nothing to go on, save that he was wearing a dark hooded sweatshirt. Had he been wearing glasses? Jewelry? Anything that was even just slightly out of the ordinary, that set him apart from the masses?

Shaking my head in frustration, I realized that I had no fucking clue.

But at least I had finally stopped bleeding. And at least the incision, deep as it was, seemed to be responding to Alex’s haphazard treatment of ointment and gauze. That may have been the thinnest silver lining I had ever seen, but it was better than nothing. Everything had turned into such a godforsaken mess that I was desperate to hold onto even the most pathetic shred of positivity.

But who had stabbed me? And _why_?

The questions tumbled through my mind restlessly, pulling me back into fear’s ugly center. As a general rule, I tried not to make enemies, but I had inevitably come to butt heads with certain people over the years. I was only human, after all—it was impossible to like _everyone_. But I honestly couldn’t think of a single person who hated me so much that he felt the need to drive a knife into my gut. 

My phone buzzed within the tangled nest of discarded clothes at my feet, breaking my cyclical train of thought, and I almost crash-landed on the floor in my haste to pick it up. For once, I was grateful for the distraction instead of cursing technology and its perfectly awful timing. 

_Coming home soon?_ read the text from Natalie that flashed across the lock screen.

I leaned back against the dresser as I tapped out a message in response.

_No, sorry. 2 drunk 2 drive. Gonna crash in Alex’s hotel room with Z. C u in the morn._

A wave of guilt coursed through me after I hit ‘send’—I imagined my wife breathing out a heavy sigh of disappointment before checking on our kids one last time, plugging her phone into its charger and settling into our king-sized bed alone—but it was only temporary. Sometimes I hated how easy it was for me to lie to the people in my life, but in that moment, the shame was almost entirely eclipsed by all the other dark things I was feeling. Plus, I’d figured out a long time ago that Natalie was too afraid of losing me to stay mad at me for long, so I knew that even if I had seriously upset her by not coming home, she likely wouldn’t dwell on it. Our marriage had seen its fair share of rough patches, but we somehow managed to trudge through them and eventually move past them. We weren’t soulmates, but at the end of the day, we were able to coexist peacefully enough.

Sadly, I couldn’t say the same for Zac and Kate. His wife was known to let the pettiest issues get under her skin and turn her into a monster—and judging by how she’d acted at dinner and what he had told me in confidence, her behavior was only getting worse with every passing day. 

I could hardly blame Zac for wanting to divorce her; I could hardly stand to be in the same room as Kate for five minutes without wanting to rip my hair out. I truly couldn’t imagine being stuck with her for _life_. She had been tolerable enough in the beginning, but each pregnancy uncovered a new unpleasant side of her, bringing her closer to God but further away from my brother. 

The faint hum of the television drifted through the closed bedroom door and reminded me that there was, in fact, a world outside of my own head. And I suddenly wanted to be part of it. Maybe Alex was right, and seeing Zac in such a sick and sorry state would only make me feel worse, but I wanted—no, I _needed_ —to be close to him. We may have been dealing with two totally separate issues, but our hearts were the same. Our love defied convention and was known to turn its back on reason, but it was one of the only things that made me feel alive. 

As I pushed the door open, I braced myself for the worst, expecting to find Zac either in the midst of retching or passed out in his own vomit, but instead, the scene I was met with was so tender and altogether shocking that it stole my breath away.

Zac had stripped down to his boxers and appeared to be sleeping, his head resting in Alex’s lap while his bare legs dangled off of the edge of the couch. Meanwhile, Alex followed a ‘Harry Potter’ movie on the TV screen through heavy-lidded eyes as he alternated between leafing his fingers through Zac’s hair and tracing soft, lazy circles on his temple.

They had certainly come a long way from their days of incessant bickering. They used to act like they despised each other, but over the course of the last couple of months, they evidently had developed a bond that was stronger than I realized. I didn’t understand it—hell, I could barely wrap my head around the fact that they were friends who texted each other from time to time—and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little jealous of how cozy and comfortable they looked together, but I didn’t feel threatened by Alex’s company. Truth be told, I was thankful for it. 

All those years ago, when my life fell to pieces and I no longer knew which way was up or down, I wasn’t just lonely. I was _alone_. I locked myself up in a self-made cage of misery and refused to let anyone in unless they served a very specific, fleeting purpose.

Back in Tulsa, there was Wes, who shared his faithful stash of pot whenever I asked him to. At first, Zac’s childhood friend seemed offended by my knowledge of his smoking habit, but little did he know that I had been watching Zac like a hawk for years, memorizing his every mood and mannerism. My brother tried to hide his slowed speech and red-rimmed eyes when he returned home after a night out, but the changes in him were crystal clear to me. When I started hanging out with Wes, I made him swear to keep our late-night trysts to himself, and to this day, I think he kept his promise.

Then there was Alex, who opened my eyes to the dark, addictive world of L.A. that led to an even darker world within myself. Who saved me and ruined me all at once. Who crept into my heart unannounced.

Yet despite my frequent social outings, those days were some of the darkest of my life because I kept my pain a secret, believing that I deserved the punishment. But Zac, stubborn as he was, always found a way in. 

On my wedding night, hours after the ceremony, while everyone else was laughing and dancing and fawning over Natalie’s slightly swollen belly, I was on the balcony with a glass of straight vodka and a pocket knife. I’d had knives engraved as gifts for all the groomsmen and hadn’t been able to resist buying one for myself as well. As I carved crooked patterns into the whitewashed wood, the liquor’s numbing effect started to take hold and I imagined that I was chipping away at my own reflection, whittling my body and soul down to nothing. 

It was Zac who drew me from my reverie, his fingers grazing my wrist as they coaxed the knife into his own calloused palm. He then approached the poor wooden ledge that had suffered the brunt of my frustration and began scratching something onto its smooth surface. He was quiet as he worked, his features veiled by thick shadows, but his eyes told their own story. Bathed in the soft, glimmering light of the moon that loomed overhead, they radiated a sad understanding that belied his years. He was only sixteen, but he may as well have been twenty or thirty years older than that for all the sympathy and love shining back at me. 

I knew better than to rush him when he was focused on one of his projects, so I leaned back against the railing, taking measured sips of my drink as I watched him. When he was done, he touched my arm again and together we gazed down at his newly formed creation. 

_We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars._

Zac was in the thick of his Brit Lit phase back then, so I wasn’t exactly surprised to find the words of Oscar Wilde staring up at me. I was, however, caught entirely off-guard when he grabbed the half-empty cup from my loose grip, drained its contents, and tossed it over the side of the balcony. He shocked me even further by pulling me into a tight hug that lasted for the briefest moment but left a mark on me forever. When it was over, I inhaled a long, shuddering mouthful of air and tasted the sweet tang of alcohol on his breath. 

“What was that for?” I asked once he stepped away from me.

“You’re hurting,” he whispered, his voice so low that I almost couldn’t hear it. “No one should have to be alone when they’re hurting.”

I returned to the present moment, battling the urge to tear Alex’s hands away from my brother’s hair and skin. The evening had been a nightmare, and there was surely more pain to come, but like the calm in the midst of a raging storm, I couldn’t bring myself to disrupt it.

Before either one of them noticed my presence, I slipped back into the bedroom, shutting the door gently behind me.


	9. Wool Blanket

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn? Yet if you look east, at sunset, you can see night rising, not falling; darkness lifting into the sky, up from the horizon, like a black sun behind cloud cover. Like smoke from an unseen fire, a line of fire just below the horizon, brushfire or a burning city. Maybe night falls because it’s heavy, a thick curtain pulled up over the eyes.” - Margaret Atwood._

Although I had gone to bed alone, I woke to feel the warm, sturdy security of Zac’s sleeping frame pressed tightly against mine. The clock behind him blinked 4:27AM, which explained the darkness that saturated every spare inch of the room. A chronic insomniac for most of my adult life, I had grown to appreciate the night—I loved the peaceful quiet that it offered when my days were so often filled with utter chaos. But there was something about that particular night that set me on edge, the weight of unspoken fears hanging in the air like ghosts, sending a shiver through me despite the closeness of Zac’s body. 

Trying to shake off the feeling, I slipped my arm around Zac’s waist and pressed a soft kiss to his forehead, fully aware that he was a very sound sleeper and wasn’t likely to be stirred. But to my surprise, his eyes fluttered open, his lips curving into a dazed half-smile when he found me staring back at him. He looked as though he wasn’t entirely sure where he was, even though he had been the one to join me. 

“How’re you feeling?” I whispered, moving in closer so that our foreheads touched.

“I think I drank too much,” Zac mumbled groggily, sounding like it pained him to speak. 

We both knew I had been asking about much more than the physical consequences of drinking too much alcohol, but he didn’t seem ready to talk about what he had brought up in the bathroom of McNellie’s. Not that I blamed him. Divorce was a bitch, plain and simple, and I couldn’t think of a more unpleasant topic to discuss after spending most of the night puking your guts out. 

“But I’m better now that I’m here with you…” he trailed off lazily, planting a feathery kiss on my lips.

Although the unforgiving stench of the bar clung to us both because it had nowhere else to go, he tasted like wintergreen toothpaste as he slowly invited my tongue into his mouth. Despite the fact that a massive hangover was lurking in the proverbial distance, waiting for just the right moment to strike, he certainly seemed to be feeling better, and it was only a matter of seconds before our kisses grew forceful and desperate, Zac’s fingers tugging at the roots of my hair as he murmured for me to roll over. 

Once I was on my back, he ran his hands gently down my sides before sliding my boxers off, tossing them to the floor with an almost triumphant flick of his wrist. My still-fresh wound prickled as his hands smoothed across my wrinkled t-shirt, just barely grazing the edge of the gauze that covered my hidden injury. I clenched my teeth in an attempt to bite back the discomfort, but Zac didn’t seem to notice anything out of the ordinary, his full attention fixed on my erection, his eyes lust-filled and hungry. 

Pain morphed swiftly into pleasure the instant his skilled mouth descended around me, his tongue dancing up and down my length at a tortuously languid pace. I really had meant to protest his advances—after all, it had been one hell of a night for us both, and I knew we needed rest—but how could I resist him? There was a shadow pulled across his features, thick as a wool blanket, and the wrinkles that lined his face made me ache with the knowledge that we were always losing time instead of gaining it, and yet he was still the most beautiful man I had ever seen. I had fallen for a handful of people in my lifetime, but none of those so-called lovers even came close to what I felt with Zac. He was both my comfort and my vice, and I wanted to lose myself in the sweet mysteries of him. 

“You know I’m behind you 100%… whatever you decide.” 

My mind was hazy with arousal, but the words that fell from my lips were surprisingly lucid, although they escaped in a breathy jumble. It was hardly an appropriate time to chat about his failing marriage, but I needed him to know that my love for him was unconditional. I needed him to know that if the rest of his foundations crumbled all around him, I would still be there for him without hesitation, without judgment.

“You can be behind me later,” he replied with a playful wink, shedding his own boxers as he spoke. “Right now, I just want you _inside_ of me.”

“Plus…” he continued quietly as he struggled to open the bedside table drawer and proceeded to fumble through it until he located the small, familiar bottle we reserved for intimate occasions. “I’ve already made up my mind.” 

I groaned as he surrounded me, arching my hips off the mattress to bring our bodies as closely together as possible. He echoed my loud moans as I filled him, throwing his head back to expose his sculpted jaw and the tempting hollow of his throat. He looked and sounded so sexy as he moved on top of me that staying in control proved to be impossible, and it wasn’t long before I was outright begging him to ride me faster, harder, _oh god please, harder_. He complied, of course, slamming down onto me over and over until my vision blurred and the ugly events of the night faded into a distant memory.

We had just reached the end of our respective orgasms when the door creaked open to reveal Alex, a mess of crumpled jeans and disheveled hair. 

“That goddamn couch just might be the least comfortable thing I’ve ever tried to sleep on,” Alex announced as he entered the room.

Zac groped behind him frantically, attempting to fling the sheets over our exposed lower halves while reaching for our boxers in a single haphazard motion, but it was too late. Alex had already seen everything, his gaze stuck shamelessly on Zac’s half-hard cock resting on my thigh.

“Sorry,” Alex said as he lowered himself onto the edge of the bed, his tone of voice implying that he was anything but. “Didn’t realize I was interrupting.”

“Bullshit,” Zac muttered, rolling off of me so that he could pull on his boxers beneath the covers. 

My attempt to dress myself was far less successful, involving a war with the tangled sheets that resulted in my t-shirt riding halfway up my chest. Upon catching sight of my bandaged midsection, Zac let out a gasp and hunched over me, his brow furrowing in evident confusion as he traced the gauze with a cautious finger.

“What the fuck?” 

“It’s nothing. Really,” I insisted when he shot me a skeptical look. “Some drunk douchebag ran into me at the bar—he spilled his drink on me and the glass broke and cut me a little. I’ll be fine… it’ll just take a couple days to heal.”

Before I could protest, Zac was gingerly peeling away the corner of the bandage, his eyes growing wider and wider as more of my skin was revealed. We were cloaked in darkness, but the incision was still visible, the jagged grooves practically glowing in the moonlight. 

“It doesn’t look like nothing,” Zac finally said. 

Although concern was written all over his face, his voice was flat and emotionless, letting me know that I had done the exact opposite of what I’d wanted to do—that I’d hurt him. And then, he replaced the bandage just as carefully as he had removed it and climbed off of the bed.

“Zac, I—” I began, frowning once I realized that I truly didn’t know what to say. 

He merely shook his head in response, and I heeded his wordless plea not to conjure up excuses. Sometimes, it was all too easy for me to get wrapped up in worlds of fantasy. Over the years, I’d learned how to repeat certain untruths to myself until I’d convinced myself they were real. It was how I coped with wanting Zac through my late teens and most of my twenties—I told myself that he could never love me back. Whenever the thought of being with him crossed my mind, I swallowed it down and threw myself into being the best performer I could be, because I had clearly failed at simply being _me_.

Zac hated my tendency to gloss over the truth, and he showed it by marching toward the bathroom without another word and shutting the door firmly behind him. Zac’s silent treatment was a wrath more daunting than his anger. But how could I expect him to be open with his feelings when I kept so much of myself locked up inside? And why did I have to be so good at making bad situations a million times worse?

“Why’d you have to barge in here like that, anyway?” I snapped in a fury, spinning around to face Alex. “There’s no way you didn’t hear us fucking.”

“Like I said, I couldn’t sleep on that piece of trash you call a couch, so I was hoping I could just crash in here with you guys,” he suggested with a casual shrug.

“No. Absolutely not.”

“Please?” he whined, batting his long eyelashes at me in an exaggerated show of patheticness. “C’mon, I’ll be good… I promise.”

“Fine,” I relented with a sigh, suddenly feeling so thoroughly drained and exhausted that the thought of arguing with Alex was far less appealing than agreeing to his ridiculous request.

“But you’d better keep your hands off of him,” I warned, not at all blind to the way his eyes had roamed appreciatively across Zac’s half-naked backside as he disappeared into the bathroom.

“As you wish,” he replied with a self-satisfied smirk, settling back against the pillows. 

Turning away from Alex, I closed my eyes and focused on the steady rhythm of the shower running to block out the heavy, erratic beating of my heart. But I was a fool to think that sleep would find me. A dark, nameless terror gripped me from within, chilling me to my core and making me feel the opposite of safe, even in the cozy confines of this hideaway we had created. 

As though he could sense how miserable I was, Alex shifted toward me, the mattress sinking slightly beneath his weight. Just as I was about to tell him to go fuck himself, the breath was stolen from my lungs when he kissed the back of my neck in a shocking show of tenderness. Despite our history, there was nothing sexual about his mouth moving gently over the newly formed gooseflesh.

In fact, it felt like an apology.

“You shouldn’t have lied to him,” he said, his lips vibrating against my skin.

“I know,” I whispered as he moved back to the opposite side of the bed, leaving me feeling cold and absurdly lonely.

* * * * * * * * * *

Zac eventually returned from the shower and crawled into bed between us, but he kept his back turned to me for the rest of the night. As I floated in and out of troubled consciousness, I could have sworn that I heard Zac and Alex talking in hushed voices, although I couldn’t make out a single word of what they were saying. Whenever I did manage to drift off, I was jolted awake within minutes, my body tingling and drenched in a cold sweat. 

I rose with the sun and drove Zac’s truck to the nearest Reasor’s, returning with all the ingredients to make his favorite breakfast—chocolate-chip pancakes with a side of fried eggs and bacon. I hoped that the enticing smell of food would draw Zac from the bedroom as it normally did, but two hours passed and he did not make an appearance. Meanwhile, I downed half a dozen cups of strong, black coffee while staring blankly out the window at the bright summer day, wondering how nature could be so cruel. 

When my restlessness reached an unbearable height, I placed my empty mug in the sink and cracked the bedroom door open to find Zac and Alex sleeping soundly beside one another, sharing the same pillow. The sense of dread I’d felt the night before upon seeing them on the couch together closed in on me with enough force to suffocate, but once again, I chose not to disturb them. 

Instead, I dumped the heaps of uneaten food into the trash, cleaned up around the kitchen, and called a cab to take me back to my house.

* * * * * * * * * *

“There you are!” Natalie exclaimed in an overly cheery tone, opening the front door before I had a chance to sneak through the garage like I’d planned. “I was just about to call you.”

Natalie could tolerate a lot, but she had a breaking point as we all do, and I knew that my recent selfishness had pushed her limits. I fully expected to be faced with one of three things: the cold shoulder, a long-winded lecture or a dramatic, hormonal outburst. But none of those scenarios played out, and there was something quite unsettling about the way she ushered me into the house—like I was a stranger rather than her husband and the father of her children.

Frankly, though, I was too tired and depressed to care about her unusual behavior. All I wanted to do was take a long, hot bath to wash away the previous night and think up a thousand different ways to apologize to Zac. But before I could take even just one step toward the staircase, she placed her hand on my arm to stop me.

“You have a visitor,” she informed me, nodding toward the living room.

At her words, I turned sharply on my heel and nearly passed out when I found Jarrod on the couch, his hands curled around a large cup of tea.


	10. Fog

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“My window fogs and this makes me feel like there is no world outside of the car.” - Augusten Burroughs._

I was vaguely aware of Natalie exiting the room after saying a smiling goodbye to Jarrod, explaining that she had a mountain of laundry to sort through, but the bulk of my attention was fixed on his mesmerizing eyes, which appeared both heavy and light all at once. The creases around them were much more pronounced than they had been mere months ago, but his dark blue irises sparkled with newfound life, reminding me of something I’d had once but had let slip away. 

After draining the last few sips of tea from the mug, Jarrod leaned forward to set it down on the coffee table, and it was then that I noticed the slumbering child by his side, clinging tightly to the hem of his shirt.

“I see you’ve made a friend,” I observed with a laugh, not at all surprised that my youngest son had been so bold as to practically crawl into a stranger’s lap. Viggo was almost _too_ trusting sometimes—a trait he must have inherited from his mother, who was neither as jaded nor as guarded as I had become.

Jarrod simply grinned and shrugged, smoothing his hand over the boy’s tousled hair as though it were a natural instinct.

“He said he liked my ‘drawing,’” he remarked thoughtfully, his eyes dropping to the lightning bolt tattooed on his bicep. 

My gaze landed there as well, my breath hitching in my throat as I fell into a bittersweet spiral of memories. All of the intimate moments we had ever shared blurred into one, until I was positively consumed by an invisible cloud of cigarette smoke, heartrending guitar chords and sweeping ocean waves that carried me back to shore. 

Suddenly feeling vulnerable (not to mention far too emotional for 9 o’clock in the morning), I scooped Viggo up off the couch and into my arms, secretly loving it when his small, sticky hands found their way to my shoulders reflexively. Even in his sleep, he seemed to need me, which was more than I could say for Zac or even my own wife. Planting a soft kiss on his forehead, I carried him into the den and placed him on the mess of blankets spread out between his brothers and sister, who were too caught up in the captivating world of cartoons to even acknowledge my presence. 

The cheerful sound of Natalie humming in the laundry room down the hall and the knowledge that all of my children were safe, healthy and content should have brought me peace—but instead, I found myself on the brink of a panic attack. Once I’d returned to the living room, I collapsed against the wall and closed my eyes, my fingers feeling along the heavy strip of gauze through my t-shirt. To my dismay, I realized that the pain was no longer contained to the wound itself but had spread through my body like a cancer, making my bones ache and my throat run dry. 

“I need to get out of here,” I blurted out.

Although the words hit the air in a raspy jumble, Jarrod seemed to understand. He led the way out the front door and into the fierce morning sun, and I followed behind him blindly, not even thinking to ask where we were going.

*** * * * * * * * * ***

The Quik Trip parking lot was deserted, and I stayed in the car as Jarrod ducked inside for a pack of cigarettes and two coffees. Leaning back against the seat, I exhaled a sigh and watched my breath fog up the glass, then proceeded to scribble my name in the filmy condensation. When we were on tour or long road trips growing up, Zac and I often occupied ourselves by writing cryptic messages to each other on the windows of the bus or our parents’ ancient RV. I always got such a thrill out of sharing secret inside jokes with him; there was something so addicting about creating our own private universe, much like the fantasy worlds we would weave around ourselves in our family’s old treehouse. 

But those days of fun, light-hearted innocence had been ripped away from me quickly and without warning, leaving me an exhausted, shell-shocked adult trapped in a teenager’s body. Like the waking nightmares that plagued me in the absence of sleep, regret was something I had learned to live with but would never truly accept. My life was filled with so many blessings, but stuck to each one was a weary shadow of self-pity, a ghost of what could have been. I didn’t want to hate myself, but on some days it was impossible not to. 

On the verge of tears, I erased the crooked letters with a few haphazard swipes of my fist and let my head fall against the window. Maybe I had finally lost my damn mind. Maybe there was poison on that stranger’s knife and it was destroying me from the inside out.

Maybe this was what the beginning of the end felt like.

“Something tells me you might need something a little stronger, but I didn’t bring enough cash for booze. Sorry,” Jarrod said, sliding back into his seat and reaching across the armrest to hand me my coffee.

“No, I’m the one who should be apologizing,” I replied, shaking my head to clear the haze from it. “I didn’t mean to lose my shit back there at the house. I just—”

“You were stabbed, Taylor,” he finished for me quietly, his eyes shining with evident concern. “I’d say that warrants a decent amount of freaking out.”

“How do you know about that?” I sat upright with a start, the scalding liquid bubbling up through the hole in the lid and spattering my jeans.

“Alex called me this morning,” he admitted. “He said you had a crazy run-in with some guy at a bar last night and that you bolted from the cabin before he woke up. He called your cell and got no answer, and then he tried to wake Zac but apparently your brother sleeps like the dead, so he called me out of sheer desperation and asked me to drive to your house to—and I quote—‘make sure that you hadn’t been kidnapped.’” Jarrod paused to take a large gulp of his drink, his eyes never straying from mine. “It’s a fucked up story, I know, and I still think Alex may have been letting his paranoia get the best of him, but I hope at least it explains why I was on your living room couch this morning like some kind of deranged stalker.”

“It doesn’t explain why you’re in Tulsa, though,” I countered as I shoved my coffee into the nearest cupholder, my hands shaking too violently to keep a firm grip on it. “Which begs the question: why _are_ you in Tulsa? And since when do you and Alex talk, anyway?”

“I’ve… uh, I’ve actually been living here for awhile. Since the beginning of summer,” he confessed, finally breaking eye contact. 

Wedging his coffee cup between his thighs, Jarrod shook two cigarettes into his cupped palm, lit one off of the other and offered it to me. Not knowing what the hell else to do, I accepted it and took a long drag in an attempt to quell the confusing swarm of thoughts threatening to overwhelm me. Meanwhile, Jarrod fell silent for a few long moments, ringlets of smoke escaping from his parted lips and drifting through the open window.

“As for Alex… he got in touch with me about opening for JJAMZ at the Compound on Friday. I guess Zac told him I was in town.” He finished his cigarette and released it onto the asphalt below, the casual motion mocking the unbearably tense situation we were trapped in. “I’m just surprised he didn’t tell _you_.”

“Come again?” I questioned, my voice cracking. “Zac knows you’ve been living here?”

Jarrod nodded. 

“I ran into him having lunch by himself at a Mexican place two, maybe three weeks ago,” he said. “He looked like he _wanted_ to be alone, so I didn’t approach him… but once he was finished eating, he stopped by the bar, bought us each a shot of tequila and then went on his way.”

“Weird,” I choked out, feeling like I had been punched in the gut.

“Tell me about it.” 

No longer in the mood to smoke, I handed my half-spent cigarette to Jarrod. Nicotine typically had such a soothing effect on me, but so far it had only succeeded in making me ten times more anxious than I already was. 

Jarrod was right—the coffee wasn’t nearly enough, but I suppose I should have been thankful that he didn’t have any drugs or alcohol on hand. Dangerous as it was, addiction was one of the only real friends I’d ever made, and although I had turned my back on it a long time ago, I would have invited it back into my life to take the edge off of my crippling loneliness. 

While Jarrod fiddled absently with the radio, I shifted my eyes to the floor and tried to make sense of the sadness closing in around my heart. It wasn’t fair of me to expect total honesty from Zac when I continually kept things from him—and yet, the fact that he didn’t tell me everything hurt more than I cared to admit. I shielded him from certain truths because I wanted to protect him… could that have been why he hadn’t told me about Jarrod? Did he view him as a threat? And what about Zac’s relationship with Alex, which was clearly more significant than I’d originally realized? Should _I_ view _that_ as a threat?

“Why Tulsa?” I lifted my gaze to his profile, admiring the way his cheeks hollowed out and then expanded with each measured breath.

“I met someone a few days after you left L.A. His name’s Justin,” he said, tracing his thumb around the rim of his coffee cup. “He stuck around after one of my lame little coffee shop gigs in order to tell me that my music changed his life. I’m sure you hear that sort of thing all the time, but I don’t—in fact, no one has ever said that to me before—so anyway, we grabbed a drink and got to talking and… I don’t know. I guess the rest is history. Something between us just clicked.”

There it was again—that unmistakable glimmer of excitement I’d caught in his eyes earlier, the spark that I had once been the cause of.

“He’s a writer who travels a lot for research, and believe it or not, his latest book brought him here for a few months,” he continued. “And I was sick of being alone, so I decided to tag along.”

“Tulsa isn’t that big,” I pointed out bluntly. “You must have figured that we’d cross paths eventually.”

“I did,” he replied with a nod. “Call me a glutton for punishment or a victim of morbid curiosity, but I honestly _hoped_ that I’d see you. Don’t get me wrong, I’d hate to open any unwanted doors to the past… but I can’t help feeling that ours was never properly closed.” 

“So is that the real reason you showed up at my house this morning? To close it?” I asked, searching his eyes for an answer. 

I almost jumped out of my skin when he reached up to brush a stray lock of hair from my forehead. The touch was not only unexpected, it was remarkably tender, filled with a love so palpable that I could see the shape of it. My pulse quickened as he ran his hand down my cheek and neck, as though he were a sculptor rediscovering the contours of an old creation. 

“No. I can’t close it,” he whispered, resting his palm against my racing heart. “I don’t know how to let you go.”


	11. Breakdown

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“It had been such a narrow escape. I kept telling myself that I could take all of the pressure; but there were those times that my body seemed almost to shut itself down, to scream that what was happening was just too much.” - Diet Eman._

Swallowing around the lump in my throat, I tore my gaze away from Jarrod’s heavy-lidded eyes, tired of catching my own reflection in them.

I stared into mirrors all the time—more frequently than was probably healthy—but the clearest glimpses of myself were always caught in the eyes of another. As terrible as it sounds, there were days when I avoided making eye contact with my own wife and children because I couldn’t bear to see the disappointment written on their faces. I worked hard to provide a good, comfortable life for my family, but I knew that I was far from a perfect husband and father. Natalie complained that I was on tour more often than I was home, but even when I was with her physically, my mind and heart were somewhere else entirely. It was hardly fair to her, yet it was the life she had signed up for. _I_ certainly wasn’t the one who had asked for a shotgun wedding and a kid to raise before I’d even reached the age of 20. Sometimes life gives you the exact opposite of what you wish for, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it but keep moving forward because it’s impossible to press ‘rewind’ and take it all back.

Even more unbearable was the pain I caused Zac whenever I wronged him.

Sometimes, I forgot just how guarded and closed-off I could be—but when I saw the helpless mixture of love and frustration etched into his features as he silently begged me to let him in, I was reminded of my shortcomings. There was a similar look on Jarrod’s face as he brushed a stray lock of hair from my forehead—a look of equal parts sorrow and acceptance, as though his pity for me was just as strong as his desire—and when he leaned in and brushed his lips against my jaw, something inside of me just snapped.

I didn’t deserve his sympathy. I had to get out of that car. 

Fighting off the urge to throw my fist through the window, I unlatched the door with a trembling hand and stumbled across the asphalt, barely feeling the blazing sun as it beat heavily upon me. By the time I reached the edge of the Quik Trip parking lot, familiar beads of perspiration had pooled along my forehead and upper lip, dragging me back to the days when I used to come apart onstage. It hadn’t happened often, but when it did—when the unending chaos of my life overwhelmed me, and the routine act of standing before a sea of screaming fans unhinged me—I wanted nothing more than to surrender; to fall into the crowd and be swept away. 

I felt the same way on that agonizing July morning. I wanted to scream at the top of my lungs until my voice was gone. I wanted to sink to my knees and let the tears flow until they had all run dry. Most of all, I wanted to let go of everything.

But Jarrod caught up with me before I had a chance to act on any of those impulses. He took several hits from a freshly lit cigarette and then handed it to me, and this time I accepted it without hesitation.

“I’m sorry,” I rasped after a lengthy pause, unable to articulate just how deep the apology actually went. Unable to say that I was sorry for Zac’s failing marriage and the troubles that plagued him, or that I was sorry we would have to keep our forbidden love under lock and key for the rest of our lives because society would never understand it, or that I was sorry I couldn’t give Jarrod what he needed.

I released all of my unspoken words in a thick cloud of smoke, watching the particles float away into the haze of daylight. 

“You’re allowed to break down every now and then,” Jarrod said quietly, his gaze fixed somewhere in the distance. “I mean, think about it… you’ve just renewed your vows in a marriage I’m not sure you _ever_ wanted to be in, you have baby number five on the way—and now, evidently, you’ve acquired some sort of stalker. I wouldn’t blame you if you lost it, Tay. No one would. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s healthier to fall apart than to keep everything bottled up inside until you implode.”

“That’s what my brothers keep telling me.”

“Well, then I guess they’re smarter than they look,” Jarrod replied with a crooked grin. “And look, I’m sorry again for showing up at your house out of nowhere. I never meant to make things even harder for you. Like I said, Alex was so freaked out by everything that happened last night that he basically ordered me to check in on you, and I—well, I wanted to see you for my own selfish reasons, too. I know it hasn’t even been that long, but I’ve missed you a hell of a lot.”

“I’d be lying if I said I was over you, because I’m not sure I ever will be, but I’m trying my best to move on,” he continued. "Plus, I think this thing with Justin has potential. We’re both kind of on the rebound—which sounds like a recipe for disaster, I know—but I can actually see it going somewhere. That’s got to mean something, right?”

Deciding that I was the last person who should be handing out relationship advice, I simply shrugged and offered him a weak smile.

“Anyway, we have dinner plans later tonight, but I’m free until then,” he said. “Want to go see a movie, or maybe grab another cup of coffee?”

“I can’t… there’s somewhere I need to be,” I mumbled, an icy fear gripping me in the midst of the scorching summer heat. Once the chill had subsided, I took one final drag from the cigarette before letting it drop to the ground, where it landed in a pile of its own ashes. “Mind giving me a ride?”

“Not at all,” he replied.

I could plainly see the questions swimming in his eyes, but he didn’t voice them. Instead, he rocked back and forth on his heels, scuffing his battered Chucks through the gravel thoughtfully. 

“You know, Taylor…” he finally spoke, sounding both hesitant and hopeful. “Even though we can’t be together, I’d still really like to have you in my life. Whatever that means.” 

“I’d like that, too,” I agreed, the tiniest hint of relief joining forces with the nicotine in my bloodstream and taking the edge off of my anxiety.

*** * * * * * * * * ***

People always joked about how Zac and I seemed to have a sixth sense when it came to finding each other, and they were right. Maybe we didn’t always know exactly where the other one was at any given moment of the day, but when I needed him—and vice versa—we somehow managed to be there when it counted. I didn’t have much faith in the supernatural, so I certainly couldn’t explain it… all I knew was that there had been an eerily strong connection between us since childhood, and in the last year in particular, it had only grown stronger.

The drive to my destination was quiet, the silence broken only when I felt the need to help Jarrod navigate the deserted back roads, but I was grateful that there was no tension in the lack of words between us. Any lingering awkwardness from my breakdown had been erased, replaced by an almost soothing sense of camaraderie. But when Jarrod slowed to a stop in front of the cabin, that nagging sense of dread returned, like a dark stormcloud creeping onto the horizon.

Zac’s truck was in a different parking space than the one I’d left it in earlier that morning, and it was parked so sloppily that I had no choice but to assume that something was very wrong. Zac was by no means a perfect driver, but he at least usually managed to park between the lines and roll the windows up, neither of which he had done that day.

Praying that my strange intuition wasn’t correct but knowing deep down that it most likely was, I climbed out of Jarrod’s car after agreeing to meet up with him at the JJAMZ show on Friday. As I walked away, I could have sworn that he called out my name, but when I turned around to answer him, he was gone.

Once I let myself in through the front door—which, unsurprisingly, was slightly ajar—I was struck by a clashing mixture of scents, among them the stench of stale alcohol, bacon grease and utter despair. Over the years, I had learned how to pinpoint emotions the same way most people located tangible things, and after taking a deep breath, I followed that instinct into the bedroom, where I found Zac dead to the world in sleep. He was facedown on the mattress, his arms splayed out in front of him, his bare legs tangled tightly in the sheets, as though he’d fought a brutal war with them but had ultimately let them win. 

Under normal circumstances, I would’ve been aroused by the sight of Zac’s body on display like that—his ass barely covered by a pair of tight black boxer-briefs and practically begging to be touched. But if he were to have awakened at that very moment and demanded sex from me, I don’t think I could have gone through with it. Not because I didn’t _want_ him (because let’s face it, I always did), but because he suddenly looked much more like a defenseless little boy than a man, and I would have hated myself for stealing away even more of his innocence. 

I lowered myself onto the bed beside him, disturbing an empty bottle of Smirnoff in the process. I set it down on the floor with a sigh and winced as the movement put an unwanted strain on my torso, calling my attention to the wound I was trying so hard to forget about. I felt much weaker than I cared to admit. I loved to play God and act like nothing could ever hurt me, but the fact of the matter was that I was just as breakable as anyone. 

I should have been upset that Zac had run into Jarrod several weeks ago but had failed to say a damn thing to me about it. Truth be told, I _was_ upset. But my overwhelming love for him canceled out the anger. How could I be mad at him when I understood his plight so well? Maybe I wasn’t married to a cold, insufferable bitch like Kate, but I knew exactly what it was like to feel trapped and powerless and alone. And I knew how exhausting it was to have to plaster a smile on your face day after day—to pretend to be happy on the outside because it was what everyone expected of you, when inside, you were drowning in your own misery.

It killed me to see him so defeated. This wasn’t the Zac I knew. He never used to binge drink to try to escape his problems—that was _my_ go-to coping mechanism, not his. I was the one prone to searching for answers in all the wrong places. I was the one who was much better at falling into holes than I was at finding my way out of them.

Rolling carefully onto my side, I wrapped my arms around him and pulled him close to me, smelling vodka on his breath whenever he exhaled. As I ran my index finger along the side of his face that wasn’t smashed into the pillow, I noticed that his skin felt much too hot to the touch—like he was burning from the inside out. 

“We’re just a couple of fucked up souls, aren’t we?” I whispered sadly. 

His only response came in the form of abrasive snoring, a sound so loud and glaringly obnoxious that he eventually woke himself up. Sitting up, he raked both hands through his hair and squinted down at me through half-closed eyes, looking as though he didn’t quite know where he was or who I was.

Meanwhile, I was too stunned to speak, transfixed by the bruise that covered his right eye—a swollen, discolored mass that ran from his eyebrow all the way down to his cheekbone.


	12. Elephant

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _There's a phrase, “the elephant in the living room,” which purports to describe what it's like to live with a drug addict, an alcoholic, an abuser. People outside such relationships will sometimes ask, “How could you let such a business go on for so many years? Didn't you see the elephant in the living room?” And it's so hard for anyone living in a more normal situation to understand the answer that comes closest to the truth; “I'm sorry, but it was there when I moved in. I didn't know it was an elephant; I thought it was part of the furniture.” There comes an aha-moment for some folks—the lucky ones—when they suddenly recognize the difference. - Stephen King._

People told me that I talked too much, even when I had nothing to say. Sometimes they were right. I talked for all sorts of different reasons—sometimes to release nervous energy, or sometimes to fill dead silence, or sometimes to convince myself that I was happy when I wasn’t. 

It was a habit I’d picked up in my teens but hadn’t even been fully aware of at the time. Back then, life had been such a chaotic whirlwind that I scarcely knew what I was doing, let alone why I was doing it. But my talent for vomiting words became all too clear to me when my I was forced to revisit our TV appearances from the late 90s. The rest of my family laughed and smiled fondly as I carried on and on about the music in those old tapes, my hands moving wildly through the air as I spoke, but I couldn’t watch them without feeling sick.

Maybe one day, I would be able to look back on what had been an undeniably amazing period in all our lives without my conscience getting in the way, but the memories still felt much too close, like if I blinked I might be instantly transported back to age 16, when I had been plagued by confusing feelings for my very own brother. When I had rambled on in hundreds, maybe even thousands of interviews in order to block out the guilt of loving someone I was not supposed to love. 

But in that moment, I couldn’t have formed a single coherent word even if I’d wanted to. The sight of Zac hunched over on the bed completely disarmed me. It wasn’t as though I’d never seen my little brother wounded before—for as much as I hated to admit ever having hurt him, I had given him a similar shiner nearly two decades ago—but this seemed different somehow. Zac was usually so good at brushing off his injuries or wearing them proudly so there was no doubt as to who the true winner of the fight had been, but this particular bruise seemed to have broken him down.

I had a feeling that it went much deeper than the surface of his skin. 

Questions like _Are you okay?_ (I already knew that answer) and _Holy shit, who did that to you?_ (I wasn’t sure I wanted to know) got lodged in my throat, forming a leaden weight that was impossible to swallow, making me feel as though my heart itself was trapped beneath my tongue—so instead of saying anything, I _did_ something. When I inched toward him on the bed, I fully expected him to move away from me, but to my surprise, he didn’t. He didn’t recoil as I wrapped both arms around him tightly and smoothed my hands over his tousled hair. He didn’t flinch or tell me not to touch him. Instead, he dropped his head onto my shoulder and let me hold him. He let me run my fingers down the velvety grooves of his spine. He even let me take his hand and brush my lips against it in an attempt to ease some of his pain. 

“I’m guessing it’s impossible to get a divorce overnight, huh?” Zac mumbled, his raspy words vibrating against the side of my neck.

I drew away from him slowly, my eyes widening at the implied meaning of his words. 

“Kate gave you that?” 

Believe me when I say I was no stranger to domestic quarreling. In fact, Natalie and I had probably engaged in more nasty arguments over our ten years of marriage than my parents had in the last _forty_. But while our anger sometimes reached dangerous levels—like the time I smashed her favorite Apulian vase into the wall in an explosive fit of rage, or the time she drunkenly tried to flush my phone down the toilet at a party where she complained that I was “flirting with anything that walked”—we were never physically violent toward each other. Natalie may have had a temper that rivaled even my own, but she knew better than to actually hit me. 

But Kate was different. She had started to change after giving birth to Shepherd four years ago, becoming colder, more abrasive, less tolerant. And when their second child came along two years later, I could hardly recognize my brother’s wife as the timid, smiling, mild-mannered girl who had once been the epitome of all things prim and proper. Time seemed to have turned her into a monster.

“Zac, talk to me,” I prodded gently, unsettled by the distant glaze that had settled over his features.

He pulled out of my embrace and sighed, reaching up to trace the outline of the bruise like he already had it memorized.

“Obviously I didn’t make it home last night and well… let’s just say Kate didn’t buy my story of having one too many drinks and passing out in Alex’s hotel room.” He looked pained as he continued to recount what had happened, his face twisting into a grimace. “First she slapped me, accusing me of being unfaithful and ungrateful, and in return I accused her of being the biggest witch I had ever met—yes, _witch_ … did I mention that our kids were within earshot?—and then she punched me. She probably would have kept going, too, if I hadn’t walked out.”

“Jesus,” I muttered.

His eyes fell closed, as though he hoped it was all a bad dream. I wish I could have told him that it was—that we would soon wake up and find ourselves tucked inside of the warm, blissful cocoon of our love where nothing else could touch us—but we both knew that wasn’t true. Things had never been that simple, nor would they ever be. 

“It was bound to happen sooner or later,” he said as he collapsed against the pillows, his voice disturbingly flat and defeated. “It’s not like she was wrong. I _am_ cheating on her… only thing is, she assumes I’m cheating with some other woman, not my own married brother.”

“And that gives her the right to abuse you?”

“Apparently so.” His eyes opened then, radiating such palpable and desperate sadness that I could feel it closing in on me as well. “Honestly, I deserve a lot more than a fucking black eye for all the horrible thoughts I’ve had about her, not to mention all the ‘sinful’ things I’ve gone behind her back and done. But I’m mostly worried about _you_.”

I tilted my head, gazing down at him with questions in my eyes. 

“Think about it, Tay… I mean, as much as I’d love to believe that what happened to you at McNellie’s was totally random, I seriously doubt it was.”

“You think _Kate_ was responsible for that?”

“No,” he replied, his agitation evident as he tugged a hand through his hair. “Didn’t I just say that she thinks I’m having an affair with a woman? Trust me, if my precious wife had even the slightest idea of how _close_ we really are, she wouldn’t have just punched me. She would have literally killed me. Only after that would she have considered doing the same to you.” 

“So, what are you trying to say?”

Before he could respond, my phone vibrated and I yanked it out of my pocket with every intention of turning it off to avoid further unwanted interruptions. However, seeing my older brother’s name on the small screen gave me pause. Once upon a time, Isaac had been famous for calling me at all sorts of odd hours just to shoot the breeze, but those days were long gone. Now, it seemed he only contacted me when either he needed my help, or he knew that I needed his. I still considered Ike to be one of my best friends, but we weren’t nearly as close as we used to be. He’d taken a noticeable step back over the last several months, silently acknowledging that Zac’s role in my life would always be greater than his. I wanted to reassure him that I appreciated him and genuinely liked having him around—that he still _mattered_ to me—but despite all the times those very words had been on the tip of my tongue, I’d never managed to voice them.

Maybe that was why there were hundreds of contacts programmed into my phone, but only a handful of them bothered to call or text me anymore. Maybe I was just that good at pushing people away. 

As the phone continued to buzz in my palm, a familiar fear stabbed into me, starting at the nape of my neck and spreading through me like a disease, and I knew that I couldn’t ignore it. So I sucked in a deep breath and pressed the little green button to accept the call.

“What’s up?”

“Oh good, you decided to pick up. Fucking finally!” Isaac exclaimed, the sheer volume of his voice making me tear the phone away from my ear and wince. Then, in a slightly more subdued tone, he asked, “Is Zac with you?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Well, I hate to interrupt your fun, but your wives are looking for you, and they don’t sound happy. I tried covering for you… I told Nat that you guys had made plans to work on some new songs, but she didn’t believe me. She said that you disappeared this morning with a friend who’d dropped by but she hadn’t heard from you since; she said she even stopped by the studio earlier to find it deserted. And Kate… well, frankly I couldn’t understand a damn word she was saying when she called, so I let Nikki deal with her. My wife is an amazingly patient and understanding woman, and you know I’d do anything in order to keep you and Zac out of trouble, but all of this sneaking around and lying is getting a little ridiculous, don’t you think?”

I could practically see him rubbing his temples as he lifted his weary gaze to the ceiling, promising himself a strong drink as soon as the conversation was over. Isaac was nothing if not predictable when it came to giving lectures.

“Anyway,” he continued. “You’re both grown-ass men and I certainly can’t tell you what to do, so I won’t. But if I were you, I would strongly consider stopping whatever it is that you’re doing and going home to your families, before even more shit hits the fan.”

“Got it,” I answered quietly, sounding every bit as sheepish as I felt. “Thanks, Ike. We really owe you one for this.”

“Yeah, yeah. You owe me a couple thousand by now, but that’s beside the point,” he brushed off dismissively. “Now, can you please go deal with your women so _my_ lovely wife and I can enjoy the rest of our day in peace?”

The call ended without a goodbye, the dial tone filling my ear with sharp bursts of sound that only added to my mounting anxiety. After powering off my phone and setting it down on the nightstand, I gave Zac my full attention once more, startled to see that his eyes had grown as dark and heavy as the bruise. 

“Sorry about that. What were you saying?”

Rolling to the side, Zac grabbed something from beneath the pillow he’d been resting against before tossing it to me. It appeared to be a tattered Polaroid with a thin layer of dirt around the edges… but of what? Of _who_?

Suddenly, there was an elephant-like weight on my chest that threatened to crush me into a mess of blood and bones, and I was at a loss for words for the second time that day. The weathered photograph he had flung into my lap was a snapshot of _us_. I remembered when it had been taken, vividly recalling the way he looked, smelled, tasted, felt as he moved against me in the blanketing quiet of the woods that night. When we had foolishly believed that we were all alone, the hazy summer moon our only witness. 

“I found it wedged beneath the front door when I got here,” Zac declared as he hung his head miserably, thick locks of hair falling into his eyes. “Someone knows about us.”


	13. Shattered

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“This planet is a broken bone that didn’t set right, a hundred pieces of crystal glued together. We’ve been shattered and reconstructed, told to make an effort every single day to pretend we still function the way we’re supposed to. But it’s a lie, it’s all a lie.” - Tahereh Mafi._

The Polaroid was like an elephant wedged into the space between us—it was impossible to ignore, yet too daunting to face, so we both just sat there for a long while, not saying anything. I had been such an insufferable talker for nearly all my life, but being with Zac taught me that silence could be just as effective as sound. 

People tended to peg Zac as the loud one—and to most outsiders, he was. After all, he’d been born with a talent for making noise with anything he could get his hands on, from our mother’s pots and pans when we were growing up, to his beloved drum kit when we were onstage—but offstage, he became quieter and quieter as the years ticked by. And when he spoke, it was with a calculated consideration that totally contradicted the brazen boy he used to be, who had practically lived with his foot in his mouth. These days, he seemed to get lost in his thoughts just as frequently as I did. In theory, it should have pleased me to be able to draw such a striking similarity between us, to have proof that we were cut from the same cloth, but in reality it concerned me greatly. I didn’t like knowing that he preferred locking himself inside of his own head instead of opening up to me. 

“How can you be so sure it isn’t Kate?” I finally asked him, turning the photograph so that the sunlight hit it at just the right angle, as though I vainly hoped it might illuminate some piece of the puzzle that I’d previously been too blind to see.

“Because she has been nothing if not very vocal with how unhappy she is with me, and she could never, ever keep a secret like this to herself,” Zac replied confidently. “If she had even the slightest inkling that we were anything more than brothers, she would have murdered me and personally delivered my body to Hell. Trust me.”

“Plus, my wife may be a bitch to _me_ , but she actually really likes you. She always has. Apparently, Natalie talks you up like you’re the best husband in the world—you cook for her on a regular basis, you fuck her whenever she asks for it, you give her as many kids as she wants, and so on and so forth,” he continued, sounding eerily unfazed, as though he were making his way through items on a grocery list. “Kate keeps telling me that I should be more like you, so I really can’t see her wanting to hurt you, let alone having you stalked and attacked.” 

“She sure as shit didn’t hesitate before throwing a punch at _you_ ,” I pointed out bitterly.

“Yes, but it didn’t hurt me. That’s just the thing. She doesn’t like inflicting pain on other people because she can’t handle the guilt. Her plan all along wasn’t to hurt me—she just wanted to pull a reaction out of me, to prove that I’m still capable of feeling something for her on some level… but it backfired. This might look like a nasty bruise, but I swear that I can’t even _feel_ it.” 

Zac settled back against the pillows and closed his eyes, his dark eyelashes painting shadows on his cheeks. How was it possible for him to look so unaffected and so beautifully wounded at the same time? Letting the photograph slide through my fingers, I shifted my focus to the bruise, hearing him suck in a sharp breath as my thumb grazed the tender skin below his browline. He said that he didn’t feel any pain, but it was written all over him, etched into the pout on his lips and the shuddering rise and fall of his chest and way he flinched when I touched him. Maybe Kate hadn’t been the one to break him, but he was broken all the same. 

“Will you at least let me put some ice on it? It’ll help with the swelling,” I explained, brushing the hair from his forehead in order to place a kiss by his temple. 

“No,” he mumbled stubbornly.

“Why not?”

“Because it doesn’t work like that, Taylor!” His tone was suddenly harsh and glaring and before I knew it, his eyes were wide open and he was sliding my shirt up to reveal my own wound. “You want me to show you every bruise, every mark, every fucked up thing I’m carrying, but you hide all sorts of shit from me. I know that part of it comes from your need to protect me, and I will always love you for that, but I hate that you keep things from me. I hate that I had to find out you were stabbed from Alex fucking Greenwald of all people. I hate that after everything we’ve been through, you still can’t bring yourself to be completely honest with me.”

“Your pain hurts me just as much as mine hurts you,” he whispered, keeping a firm grip on my waist as he gazed up at me, his fingers digging into to the edges of the blood-soaked gauze. “Why can’t you understand that?” 

And then he sat up, pressed a burning kiss to my lips and slowly let me go. I wanted to answer him, but it was too late—he had already slid out of bed and begun tugging on his clothes, his back turned to me as he zipped up his jeans, shoved his bare feet into his Pumas and grabbed his keys from the nightstand. 

I wanted to tell him that he had my heart, and that was more important than any scar or bloodstain on my skin, but I choked on the words instead, drowning in a sea of dread and remorse and a sadness that was too deep to give a name to.

*** * * * * * * * * ***

Dinner at home was a nightmare. Not only was there a strange, impermeable tension hanging in the air, making my already harrowing day exponentially worse, but River decided that flinging forkfuls of mashed potatoes directly at his sister’s face was a much better idea than eating them. Then, Viggo refused to stop asking about my friend with the ‘drawings’ (meaning, of course, Jarrod and his colorful array of tattoos). Natalie was quick to follow our son’s innocent questions with several loaded inquiries of her own, which I dodged as artfully as I could manage while attempting to shield poor Penelope from any more unwanted food missiles from the other side of the table. When the meal was finally over, Ezra seemed to channel an angel and somehow herded the rest of his siblings into the den to watch a movie. 

But although the chaos had been tamed—at least temporarily—the fun didn’t end there. Oh, no. 

After clearing the table and loading the plates into the dishwasher, I settled into my favorite chair on the deck in the hopes of stealing a few precious moments of peace. But the second I made myself comfortable, Natalie appeared and summoned me into the bedroom to give her a massage. It wasn’t so much a request as it was a demand, and after playing the pregnancy card as well as reminding me that I had been gone all day without warning or explanation, I wasn’t in any position to refuse her. The truth was that I too could have used a full body rub, but the only hands that could bring me relief belonged not to my wife, but to my brother. A man who was damaged but wouldn’t let me fix him. Who pushed me away when I got too close. Who had been in my life for as long as I could remember but didn’t seem to want to be near me anymore. 

Once I had pleased her and she had retreated into the basement to keep the children company, I wandered outside and into our expansive backyard for no good reason at all but to get away from everything. When I had placed a respectable distance between myself and the house, I collapsed onto the grass and folded my arms behind my head, watching the stars wink down at me from their beds in the hazy summer sky. I grew so drowsy from the thick evening heat and the faint hum of crickets all around me that I might have been lulled into slumber had my cell phone not screamed for my attention. Rolling over onto my stomach to free it from my back pocket, a jolt of feeling rushed down my spine when I found Zac’s name staring back at me.

“Tay?” his voice carried across the line in a gravelly murmur. “Taylor, are you there?”

“I’m here,” I answered softly.

“Good. I wanted to say that I’m sorry for earlier… for leaving like that without even saying goodbye.”

“It’s okay,” came my eager reply. “I shouldn’t have—,”

“No, please let me finish,” he cut me off insistently, my mouth falling closed at his quiet command. “Look, I know how much you care about me. And _you_ know how much I love you. But this is just too dangerous. We were such fools to ever think that we could sneak off to some secluded cabin in the woods to be together and no one would ever notice. People are starting to notice, Taylor—you have the scar and I have the photograph to prove it. God knows what else will happen if we don’t stop now.”

“What do you mean, _stop now_?”

He breathed out a heavy sigh, the weight of it pressing down on me as well. 

“You know what I mean,” he said gently. “You know that no one makes me feel the way you do. No one loves me the way you do. No one _completes_ me the way you do. But we can’t ignore these warning signs.”

“So, what exactly are you saying?” I eased myself into a sitting position, hugging my knees to my chest as the darkness closed in on me. “What if this is just some stupid fan trying to fuck with us? I don’t want to live the rest of my life in fear, Zac. I _can’t_ do that.” 

“You’re right, maybe a crazy fan is behind this. In fact, I hope that’s all it is. But what if it isn’t? What if that guy at the bar didn’t just intend on stabbing you? What if he meant to _kill_ you? I don’t want to live in a constant state of fear either, but I can’t bear the thought of something else happening to you—something that time and bandages won’t fix—and knowing that I could have prevented it.”

It had been one step forward, two steps back with him for a long time, and under any other circumstance, I might have been able to convince myself that he would take back what he said. But deep down, I knew that he wouldn’t. He had spoken with such sad certainty, the sheer and unwavering conviction in his tone echoing how he’d sounded when he told me he wanted a divorce. This was a permanent decision, and once he’d made up his mind, it was clear that no amount of begging or arguing or pleading could possibly change it.

“I’m sorry, Taylor,” he whispered. “I’m so fucking sorry.”

When the dial tone filled my ear, I let out a strangled cry and slammed my fist against the ground with enough force to break it, but I didn’t even wince. At that point, I could have shattered every single bone in my body and I wouldn’t have felt a damn thing. Like Zac, I was numb. The bruise on his cheek would eventually heal, and the incision on my skin would one day fade to a distant memory, and then we would both be left with nothing.


	14. Hypocrite

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know.” - Joyce Carol Oates._

_Still coming out tonight?_

I glanced down at Alex’s text from my spot in the line at Starbucks, my insides twisting into knots when I thought about just how brutally awkward the forthcoming evening was bound to be. But a promise was a promise, and since I’d already given both Alex and Jarrod my word, it was too late to back out now.

_I’ll be there._

After typing out a brief reply, I slid my phone back into my pocket with a sigh. Following the horrendously eventful night at McNellie’s, Alex had fled the scene to spend some time with his cousin who lived in Oklahoma City, and save for the occasional drunk text, I hadn’t heard much from him since.

Sometimes, I truly envied the life that Alex led. He wasn’t tied to anyone or anything, and he could come and go whenever he pleased. As for me? I’d been trapped for the last decade and had just renewed the lifelong lease of imprisonment. But my sense of confinement didn’t just apply to my family—no. It spilled over into my career as well as my social life. I couldn’t go anywhere around Tulsa without the risk of being recognized. Not only that, but I was beginning to genuinely fear for my safety. But what was I supposed to do? Hire a personal bodyguard? Never show my face in public again? Every solution that popped into my head sounded overly dramatic and absurd, and the best move seemed to be to “keep on keeping on,” so to speak. However, that didn’t stop my paranoid mind from running wild as I tried to answer the impossible question of who on God’s green earth had stabbed me.

My thoughts were interrupted by a frazzled young barista asking for my order, and I quickly rattled it off and approached the counter to pay. After giving her a five-dollar bill and telling her to keep the change, I stepped aside to wait for my coffee. But not even two split seconds after I’d been handed my drink (I didn’t even have time to take a sip), I felt a pair of freakishly strong arms take hold of my midsection, startling me so badly that I almost jumped out of my skin. Yelping in a mixture of panic, shock and fear, I spun around quickly—trying to keep a grip on my expensive coffee all the while—only to find myself face-to-face with Wes, a glint of amusement dancing in his eyes at my reaction.

“Jesus, Hanson. Are you sure you need _more_ coffee right now?” Wes raised his eyebrows, nodding at the oversized cup in my trembling hand. “Because you seem pretty fucking wired to me as is.”

The knowledge that the person who’d bumped into me was only Wes—calm, unassuming Wes, who had been a family friend since childhood and remained one of the few people in this turbulent world I could actually trust—should have put me at ease, but I couldn’t seem to shake my anxiety.

In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d truly been able to relax. Between the stabbing and Zac breaking things off with me so abruptly, I’d been a walking mess of jumbled nerves… and Wes was right. I probably didn’t need any more coffee. But I hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in ages, and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to make it through the day without caffeine in my bloodstream. 

“It’s been a long morning,” I explained, following him away from the growing crowd of people waiting for their drinks.

“I can tell,” he replied, implying that I looked every bit as exhausted as I felt. He sank down into a chair at an empty table and motioned for me to join him. “D’ya have a minute to hang, or is there somewhere you need to be?”

“I can stay for awhile.”

Truthfully, I had nowhere else to go but home, and I wasn’t in any rush to dive back into the chaos. Sliding into the seat across from him, I took a long sip of coffee and tried to control my breathing, not wanting to reveal just how affected I was by his playful attack.

“So, that’s some pretty crazy shit about Zac, isn’t it?”

So much for controlling my breathing. Wes’ words caused my heart to pound so violently that I feared it might leap out of my chest and land in the space between us—a wild, grotesque display of brokenness. The remains of a man who had literally come apart at the seams.

“What do you mean?” I asked in as neutral a tone as I could manage.

“Apparently, he and the missus got into it late last night, and Katie kicked him out. It was after 2AM when he called me up to ask if he could crash on my couch,” he explained, swirling the straw through his iced coffee. “He didn’t tell you?”

I shook my head wordlessly, afraid that if I even so much as attempted to speak, my voice would crack and betray my true feelings on the subject.

Of course he hadn’t told me. He’d _dumped_ me just a few hours prior to that, and I hadn’t expected him to come running right back into my arms for comfort. It made sense that he had turned to Wes, though. The Polaroid snapshot of our tryst in the woods made it clear that someone knew about our hideaway, which meant that the cabin was no longer a true safe haven for us. Plus, Wes always had an impressive stash of weed on hand, and I had no doubt that after the day he’d had, Zac needed something to take his mind off of everything. And although his recent drunken antics may have indicated otherwise, his preferred poison wasn’t alcohol.

“He looks really bad, Tay. I’ve helped him through some rough patches before, but this one seems to be the worst yet,” Wes continued, shaking his head. “And did you see that mother of a shiner? He wouldn’t tell me how he got it, but damn. He’s been having one hell of a time lately, hasn’t he?” 

“Yeah,” I replied quietly, shifting my gaze to the tabletop. “He really has.”

“Anyway, are you going to that Jisms show at the Compound tonight?”

He changed the subject so swiftly that I couldn't help but wonder if my response had been a dead giveaway that I wasn’t merely a spectator in this ugly war Zac was battling, but that I too was an active participant.

“Yeah.” I was too exhausted to bother correcting him. It wasn’t as though the band’s actual name was much better. “Are you?”

“I guess.” He shrugged, leaning back in his chair. “Zac said he could get me on the list, and he also mentioned something about an after party with free alcohol. Hey, speaking of booze, are y’all still planning on launching your own beer sometime next year?”

“Honestly, Wes?” I glanced up at him wearily, my tone just as heavy as my heart. “At this point, I have no idea what the future holds. Not a single fucking clue.”

*** * * * * * * * * ***

In all my life, I could count on one hand the number of times I’d shown up _early_ for an event, and the day of the JJAMZ show marked one of those extremely rare occasions. Doors weren’t until eight o’clock, but I pulled into the parking lot just shy of six-fifteen like some overeager fan dying for a front row spot. As I scanned the few other cars scattered about, I caught sight of Zac’s familiar license tag and my heart dropped. And it sank even further into the pit of my stomach when I spotted him by the doorway of the venue, talking to Alex while mindlessly toying with the scrap of black cloth that covered his right eye.

Yes, Zac was wearing an eyepatch.

However, instead of concealing the nasty bruise, the unsettling piece of fabric only served to draw more attention to it. A pang of longing shot through me as I watched Alex free several strands of my brother’s hair from beneath the thin strap before smoothing them back into place with his fingers. Why couldn’t _I_ be the one he relied on for help?

I should have been enraged at Zac for calling things off with me so abruptly over the phone the night before. For pushing me away during such a fragile time, especially after I’d let him know in no uncertain terms that I was willing to do whatever it took to be with him. Was I frustrated, confused and upset? Oh, yes. But I wasn’t _angry_.

No, I was just sad. There was a sense of defeat looming overhead, radiating its keen desire to crush me to a pulp if I let it swoop in and have its way with me.

As much as I wanted to corner him, to get down on my knees and beg him to talk things out, I knew better than to approach him. It seemed that he wanted very little to do with me anymore. Despite the fact that I’d been an unfailing constant in his life practically since birth, he seemed far more willing to confide in Wes and even Alex before leaning on me for support. And that hurt. No, it fucking _stung_ , his excruciating actions driving a pain into me that was deeper and more lasting than the wound I had sustained.

A soft tapping on my driver’s side window snapped me out of my depressing thoughts, my pulse thudding in my ears like a bass drum as I turned my head to find Jarrod staring at me through the glass. After grabbing my cell phone from the seat beside me and pulling the keys from the ignition, I climbed out of the car, the smell of nicotine immediately lighting up my senses.

“Well, this is a nice surprise.”

Jarrod caught my eye and flashed me a look of mock bewilderment as he blew a wispy cloud of smoke into the air. Due to having been on the road with us for a decent length of time, he was well aware of my penchant for tardiness when it came to just about everything.

“I know, I know,” I replied. “Mark your calendar, because today will most definitely go down in history. I honestly can’t remember the last time I wasn’t late for a show—and that includes my own.”

He chuckled and flicked a dusting of ashes to the ground, the motion causing his tattoo to flash in and out of view with the sudden, sharp intensity of an actual lightning bolt.

“Well, we just finished soundcheck, so I was thinking about killing some time at the pub around the corner,” he said. “Want to join me for a drink?”

“Sure.”

Not only was I desperate for something to take the edge off of my terrible mood, I was also in dire need of an escape. I couldn’t bear to be so physically close to Zac when I felt so very far away from him. And I _really_ couldn’t stand to watch Zac and Alex engage in yet another private pow-wow. I was thankful that Jarrod hadn’t suggested that we invite them along. Alex was my friend first and foremost, and I knew that his behavior toward Zac was more out of concern for me than anything else, but I couldn’t deny the raging jealousy that seized me when I saw them together. Was Zac trying to give me a taste of my own medicine? Was this how he’d felt when he caught me in bed with Alex or stumbled upon those photos of Jarrod and me on my laptop? Was this his way of letting me know that he’d never actually gotten over any of that?

_You want me to show you every bruise, every mark, every fucked up thing I’m carrying, but you hide all sorts of shit from me._

Zac’s words spun through my mind on an insufferable loop, haunting me with their raw sincerity. I was nothing but a hypocrite. I didn’t deserve his love or his time or his affection. Hell, I didn’t deserve those things from _anyone_. I deserved to be alone.

As we walked past the entrance of the Compound, Alex offered us a nod and a crooked smile, but Zac didn’t make any move to acknowledge us at all. For how invisible I felt in that moment, I may as well have not existed.

“What’s the deal with Captain Zac Sparrow over there?” Jarrod wondered aloud once we were out of earshot, offering me the rest of his cigarette.

“Don’t know,” I answered flatly after taking a long drag. “Don’t care.”

I wondered if Jarrod could sense that I had to practically choke the words out to force them past my lips. I wondered if he knew that like so many of the things I said, they couldn’t have been further from the truth.


	15. Tornado

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _For a second I was almost jealous of the clouds. Why was he looking to them for an escape when I was right here beside him? - Kamila Shamsie._

One drink with Jarrod turned into several and before long, I was sufficiently buzzed. My anguish over Zac ending our relationship hadn’t faded completely, but it had been effectively dulled by all of the beer I’d consumed in the last hour

I should have anticipated just how easy it would be to fall back into old habits. After all, I was a self-proclaimed creature of habit. Yes, I often had a magnetic-like propensity toward danger and had spent quite a bit of my youth seeking out thrills to avoid ever being numb, but at the end of the day, I craved security. Comfort. Stability. And Jarrod was providing all of those things I’d been sorely lacking in the wake of recent events, his smile and soft voice taking me back in time to the days on tour when we first really got to know each other. We used to spend hours in the secluded corner of a nameless bar in whatever city we happened to be in that night. Sometimes, we didn’t even have to exchange any words; our connection was strong enough to allow us to learn each other’s secrets through subtle looks and meaningful silences alone.

Thoughts of Zac kept rising to the surface—he would always be on my mind in some way, shape or form—but the more I drank, the easier it was to push them back down. I knew better than to think I could ever _rid_ my thoughts of him, but the pain was much more tolerable when shrouded by inebriation. 

“So,” I began, pouring myself another sloppy glass of beer from the pitcher. “Where’s this mysterious boyfriend of yours? I figured he’d be here tonight.”

The intoxicated grin slipped from Jarrod’s lips, and it was a struggle not to look down to see where it landed. There was something dark and unspoken lurking behind his eyes, but I knew better than to pry. After all, he hadn’t pressed me to divulge the things that I was hiding.

“Yeah, he planned on coming, but something came up with work at the last minute. He said he’d try to make it to the after party, but I’m not holding my breath. Justin has the worst sort of tunnel vision when it comes to his job.”

“He sounds like a workaholic,” I mused.

“If that’s the case, then you guys would probably be best friends in no time at all,” he responded with a knowing smirk.

“Touché.”

“What about you?” he asked, swiveling his barstool in order to face me.

“What about me?”

“How are things?”

“Work’s been pretty slow so far this summer,” I explained through a mouthful of beer. “We’re heading to Australia soon, so we’re just trying to get everything ready for the tour. And things at home have been crazy, as can be expected, since Natalie’s pregnant again and—”

“I wasn’t asking about the band or your wife,” Jarrod interrupted me, shooting me a pointed look.

I raked a hand through my hair and swallowed thickly, caught off-guard by his straightforwardness. Although Jarrod had known about my feelings for Zac for quite some time thanks to my own unintentional admission, I figured that discussing my relationship with him would only add insult to injury. But there wasn’t a single hint of jealousy or distress in his features as he prompted me to open up to him. Then again, maybe I shouldn’t have been so shocked. Jarrod was one of the most intuitive people I’d ever met—and much like Zac, he always seemed to know just what I needed. 

“Things were amazing for awhile, but now they’ve pretty much fallen to shit. In fact, I’m not sure they’ve ever been this bad,” I confessed, feeling remarkably exposed even though I hadn’t delved into any of the specifics. “It’s like, all the progress we made after coming home from L.A. was erased in the blink of an eye. And I feel like it’s all my fault, but I have no fucking clue how to fix it.”

“I think you’re being too hard on yourself,” Jarrod remarked before draining the last of his beer. “Maybe he just needs a little time.”

I pursed my lips together in a conscious effort to prevent myself from saying what was on the tip of my tongue. To prevent myself from voicing that I’d been in love with Zac for so long—even longer than I’d been married—that the mere thought of the slightest shred of distance between us was a specific brand of agony. Zac had wanted me at one point, hadn’t he? He’d even claimed to be in love with me in return. But evidently, that hadn’t been enough. 

“Can I interest you boys in a refill?” the bartender asked as she collected our empty pitcher.

I glanced at Jarrod, wanting him to make the call. For being such a typically take-charge person, someone other people (with the exception of Zac) turned to for guidance and direction, I was feeling very lost and out of place in my own skin. And in that moment, I didn’t trust myself to make _any_ sort of decision, even one as seemingly harmless as ordering another round of drinks.

“As much as I would love to sit here with you all night, we should probably close out the tab so I can start getting ready for the show,” Jarrod said, reaching for his wallet.

“You don’t have to pay for me,” I insisted, my fingers grazing Jarrod’s wrist as he slid his credit card across the counter.

His gaze washed over both of our hands with an intensity that led me to believe he was taking a mental snapshot to carry around with him—a bittersweet memento of what could have been.

“I know I don’t have to. I _want_ to.” His voice was low and husky as he shifted his gray-green eyes back up to mine. “Tell you what. You can return the favor next time.”

*** * * * * * * * * ***

I was genuinely looking forward to watching Jarrod perform again. It had been a long time since I’d seen him onstage, but I hadn’t forgotten his talent for weaving vivid webs of emotion that I couldn’t help but get caught up in. Most of the time, I hated feeling trapped and cornered, but I honestly _enjoyed_ handing myself over to his heartfelt words. His songs pinned me down and made me feel them, offering me an escape from my own tangled thoughts.

But on that particular night, I was hardly able to focus on his set. As soon as Jarrod stepped onto the small stage with his guitar in tow, Alex, Zac, Wes and Isaac approached the bar I was leaning against and ordered a handful of whiskey shots, their loud, slurred voices letting me know that this wasn’t their first, second or even third drink of the evening. Zac was still wearing that stupid patch over his right eye, but his left one may as well have been covered too, for how dark and entirely unreadable it was.

We were all wedged into an impossibly tight space, and Zac and I were close enough to touch, but he refused to meet my gaze. Instead, he clinked glasses with both Alex and Wes before downing the amber-tinted shot and chasing it with the beer clutched in his other hand, ignoring me completely. I couldn’t stand cheap whiskey, but I accepted the shot that Isaac pushed toward me and invited the burning liquid down my throat. I felt like I’d been lit on fire, but in that moment, I didn’t care if I went up in flames. I had a career, a healthy family, and friends who would do anything for me, but the only thing I really _needed_ was Zac.

And he had never felt further away from me.

Placing my empty glass on the bar, I nodded for another unnecessary shot. Although my back was to the stage, I was vaguely aware that the audience had fallen silent to make room for Jarrod’s quiet voice as he introduced the next song.

“Some people believe that they’re destined to be alone. That they’ve been cast aside, abandoned… that they’re no good for anyone. These people tend to blame themselves for everything, including all of life’s bullshit that they can’t control. And as the years wear on like they always do, these people start to feel like there’s no way out. Well, this song… is actually a pretty fucking depressing one,” Jarrod admitted through a gravelly chuckle, resituating his guitar on his hip. “But buried somewhere in it is the message that there is always a way out. And despite how lonely you may feel, you’re never really alone.”

And then he cleared his throat and began to sing.

_One day you woke up ten years older  
Taken prisoner like a soldier  
You left your home for what seemed noble  
Give anything to do it over_

_Alone now, there must be some other way  
To control how your anger turns into rage_

_Cause I know, I know life's so unfair  
We used to escape under the brilliant glare…_

My heart slammed to such a keening halt in my chest that I had to rest one elbow on the bar to steady myself. 

Jarrod had written that song about _me_ , and while I’d never told Zac about it, I could tell that he had figured it out on his own. Quickly finishing the last of his beer, he whispered something to Alex before disappearing through the side door of the venue. Zac had always been good at darting through thick crowds of people, but over the last several months, he had acquired the expertise of an actual escape artist.

Abandoning my untouched shot on the countertop, I spun on my heel and followed him. Alex grabbed my arm as I passed by—a futile attempt to get me to stay—but I didn’t heed his silent request. I needed to put a stop to this gathering storm before it turned into a full-on tornado and destroyed everything in sight. 

I spotted Zac on the far side of the parking lot, his hands jammed into his pockets as he stared up at the moonlit clouds still lingering at the mouth of the darkening sky. Maybe it was thanks to the alcohol flowing hotly through my veins, or the fact that I loved him more than life itself, but I refused to let him stand there all alone. He’d made it clear that he didn’t want to be with me, but no matter what happened, I was still his brother, still his friend, still linked to him in a way that no one else could ever hope to understand.

The discernible tensing of his shoulders didn’t hinder my approach. I needed to figure out how to tear down his invisible armor, and I couldn’t do that from a distance. Once I was beside him, I too searched the bruise-colored canvas high above us for the answers to his questions, as well as some of my own. Was he thinking about his broken marriage? His children—both existing and unborn? Alex? Me? _Us?_ But the moon gave no reply, sending down a gentle breeze as a half-assed excuse for an apology.

“I wish you would stop pushing me away,” I finally spoke, hating myself for sounding exactly as helpless as I felt.

“And I wish you would stop chasing after me.” 

Zac’s words struck me like a punch to the gut, causing me to suck in a breath to absorb the force of impact. Once upon a time, when I viewed my life not as something to be lived but a cage blocking out the light we all needed to survive, _he_ had been the one chasing after _me_. Refusing to let me wallow in a marriage I neither wanted nor was ready for, Zac forced me out of my dark house and into the sun, driving around with me aimlessly as we passed through the familiar streets of our hometown, a mix of our favorite songs playing in the background. Reminding me that there was beauty left in the world, even though sometimes it was practically impossible to see. But now that our roles were reversed, he seemed to have forgotten all about those stolen moments that we’d shared. Maybe they had never meant much to him in the first place. 

“I thought I could do this… I thought I could make this work, Taylor. I really did. But I can’t. It’s just too difficult. Every time I turn around, there’s another threat, another element of danger thrown into the mix, and I hate having to keep my defenses up all the time, never knowing when the next lightning bolt will strike.” Zac exhaled a heavy sigh then, kicking a few errant pebbles into the dying grass beyond us. “Call me weak, because that’s what I am. I’m weak and I’m too damn tired to fight for anything right now.”

“It doesn’t have to be like this,” I said.

Seized by a sudden bout of courage, I coaxed his hand out of his pocket and threaded our fingers together, my right hand a perfect fit for his left. I had never been more conscious of or thankful for the fact that he wore his wedding ring on a cord around his neck than I was in that very moment. It gave me hope that maybe, just maybe, despite the conviction buried beneath his weary tone, he didn’t truly _mean_ what he had said. 

“I know things with Kate are seriously on the rocks right now and you think everything else is fucked up beyond repair, but I want to help. I want to fight _for_ you,” I pleaded, tightening my grip on his hand. “Let me help you. Please let me back in.”

He jerked away from me then, as though I were a disease he was afraid of catching. Tearing the patch away from his face, he revealed an ugly, battered, swollen mess where there used to be nothing but unblemished perfection. Such was the state of things between us.

“I’m sorry,” Zac said with a shake of his head, all the while continuing to move away from me.

And then he turned and headed for his truck without looking back. As Zac sped off into the night, I blinked through my haze of sadness and noticed a hooded figure emerging from the shadows. A cry of sheer terror died on my lips as a strong hand secured my arms behind my back, another one closing around my throat and swiftly cutting off my air supply. A bag was pulled over my head, and soon all I could see was impermeable darkness.

“I’ve been waiting for this for a long time,” a deep voice whispered by my ear. 

Seconds later, I was knocked to the ground and the whole world went black.


	16. Prisoner

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“For years now, I've wanted to fall asleep. The sort of slipping off, the giving up, the falling part of sleep. Now sleeping is the last thing I want to do.” - Chuck Palahniuk._

_“Holy fucking shit.”_

_“Is he breathing? He looks like…”_

_“Don’t say it, Alex.”_

_“Shit, this is bad. This is really fucking bad.”_

_“Taylor, can you hear me? If you can hear me, try to open your eyes and look at me. You’re okay. Everything is going to be okay.”_

_“How the fuck can you say that? You’re not a doctor, Jarrod.”_

_“You’re right, I’m not. But freaking the fuck out like you’re doing right now isn’t helping. Speaking of helping, can you come over here and give me a hand? These knots are really tight.”_

The voices floating around me were at once familiar and distant, like the dreams that often felt so close to me in the throes of slumber but floated away the instant I awoke. Was I awake or dreaming? Why couldn’t I move my hands or form a coherent string of thoughts? Why did I feel so empty?

_“Seriously, Jar, look at his stomach. Maybe we should take him to a hospital…”_

“No,” I croaked, recoiling violently as a warm hand came into contact with my wrist. 

“Taylor, easy, it’s just us. Jarrod and Alex. We’re not going to hurt you. We just need you to stay still for a minute while we untie you.” 

Jarrod’s measured voice usually balanced me—it was such a soothing, rejuvenating source of comfort—but that night, it truly seemed like nothing in the world could calm me down. My head was pounding, the searing pain making it difficult to will my eyelids open, and once I did, I immediately regretted it. The deceptively simple act of opening my eyes was the worst thing I could have possibly done, for it invited in a flood of brutal memories that were much too close. Sickeningly vivid memories that I hadn’t been remotely prepared for the first time around and certainly wasn’t ready to revisit.

I knew that Jarrod and Alex were hovering over me, gently attempting to free my hands from their confines, but all I could feel were the hooded stranger’s hands on me. All I could hear was his voice, a series of whispered threats and unsettling sounds of pleasure ringing in my ears. And all I could see were the dark shadows that had kept me company during the worst hours of my life.

The only reason I knew it had been a matter of hours as opposed to days was that when I closed my eyes to block out what was happening, I pictured a clock—a beat-up thing whose digital numbers were unnervingly bright but whose ragged exterior looked like it had been through hell and back. And instead of focusing on the pain, I counted time, watching each agonizing minute bleed into the next in my mind’s eye, hoping that it was a nightmare from which I would soon wake up. 

But it wasn’t.

Maybe this was payback for all the times I’d wished I was anywhere but tucked safely into bed beside my wife, my children sleeping soundly down the hall. All the times I’d tried to get out, if only just to sneak into the backyard for a cigarette that my overcrowded life rarely allowed me to finish. All the times I’d felt locked inside of an existence that was, in fact, a pretty damn blessed one. I would have given anything to be home with my family on a normal crazy whirlwind of a day, Viggo smearing globs of fingerpaint all over my face while Natalie whined to me about her latest pregnancy craving and River and Penny butted heads about some non-issue that would be forgotten by bedtime. That was sheer paradise compared to my current state, which found me in the fetal position in the backseat of my car, feeling more like a prisoner than I ever had before. 

As Alex and Jarrod worked at the soft yet restricting binds that held my wrists in place, I gazed out across the dark, starless night visible through the rear window and did something I hadn’t done in a long time—I prayed. God had always been more of a failsafe than a vital presence in my life. Preferring to be in control at all times, I turned a blind eye to invisible forces, even when it was clear that something more powerful and dangerous than I could ever hope to be had seized the reins. But in that moment, I needed something to believe in. I couldn’t do this on my own.

Once I had finished asking the cloud-covered sky for the strength to get through something I wasn’t sure I had survived in the first place, I glanced back up at my friends. They both seemed to be holding their breath, as though they didn’t want even the smallest pocket of air to disturb me. As though I was suddenly breakable and the slightest movement might shatter me. I nearly laughed out loud at the thought. If that were the case, I would have been pulverized into a billion ugly pieces a long time ago. 

With the scarves that had been used as makeshift handcuffs unwound and cast aside, I was free to sit up and move around, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was paralyzed.

“Can you remember what happened?” Alex’s voice descended through the silence; unlike Jarrod, he didn't know when or even how to bite his tongue.

I nodded.

“Do you know if there was just one of them? Two? Three? Can you tell me anything about what he looked like? What was he wear—”

“ _Alex_ ,” Jarrod cut in sternly, putting an end to his frenzied line of questioning. “You need to chill out. I know you want answers—we all do—but now is not the time for an interrogation.” 

“I’m just so fucking _angry_!” Alex banged his fist into the window with a force that made me flinch—that probably would have made me jump if I’d been physically capable of doing so. “The bastard who stabbed him at the bar the other night is clearly behind this, and when I find out who he is, I'm going to annihilate him. I’m not going to hold back. He’s going to suffer a slow, painful death that leaves him wishing he was never born.”

“You don’t have to tell us anything until you’re ready,” Jarrod assured me over Alex’s heated ramblings. “And if you don’t want to go to the hospital right now, that’s your call, but at least let me take a look at that.”

When Jarrod’s fingers grazed my torso through the fabric of my shirt, brushing against the incision that I’d foolishly convinced myself was healing mere hours ago, a cry of unbridled anguish tore past my lips before I could stop it. 

I wasn’t strong enough to fight this. Someone wanted to destroy me, had shoved me down onto a dusty floor and fucked me and had then gotten off to the sight of me writhing beneath him as he dragged a lit cigarette up and down my still-fresh wound. Eventually, the smell of my burning flesh made me sick, and only when I was choking on my own vomit did he remove the bag from over my head and proceed to blindfold me with a scarf, pressing my head against the cold, hard ground with the heel of his shoe until he’d secured it to his liking. And then he’d forced me to suck him off and swallow every last mouthful of his foul release. 

I honestly believed he was going to kill me before the night was over, so once he entered me, I clenched my eyes shut tightly and chanted silent goodbyes to everyone I loved. Kaleidoscope images of my parents, my wife, my kids and my siblings rotated across my compromised vision—moving not necessarily chronologically, but definitely in order of importance—and the very last and brightest snapshot was of Zac, his brown eyes smiling in the fading sunlight as he pulled me down on top of him and claimed my lips in a passionate kiss. 

What if I never saw Zac again? That thought alone should have reduced me to tears, but I had none to give. I had thrashed and bled and puked my guts out, but I hadn’t cried. I’d been too stunned and scared for my life to shed a single tear. If this was the end—and I had reason to believe that it was—at least the last words I’d exchanged had been with Zac. It wasn't an ideal closing scene, but what in life ever measures up to our lofty, rose-tinted standards? Even true love inevitably surrenders to the cruel wrath of human nature, falling gracelessly from its pedestal and losing its inspiring luster as we all do when we’re beckoned six feet under. 

But the stranger (could I still technically call him that, even though he’d been inside of me, had seen and felt parts of me that most people never would?) hadn’t killed me. No, instead he had redressed me and calmly enjoyed a slice of cold pizza before taking me back to my car, where he’d thrown me across the seat like I was a ragdoll, tossed my keys by my feet and closed the door firmly behind him. 

Although I still couldn’t see a goddamn thing, I knew exactly where I was; the leather upholstery smelled distinctly like my daughter’s strawberry shampoo and the cologne I’d swiped from Zac’s duffel bag the last time we were on the road together. For whatever reason, the man had spared my life. He wasn’t done with me, though. He’d made it clear that there would be a “next time.”

I couldn’t bring myself to share any of these chilling recollections. I knew I’d have to talk eventually, but in that moment, all I wanted to do was… no, not _sleep_ , but switch my brain off and tune out. I didn’t want to analyze the details. I didn’t want to sit there dumbly like some fucking invalid while everyone around me walked on eggshells. It was why I was so adamant about not being taken to the hospital. I didn’t care if I needed medical attention—I refused to expose myself to curious eyes and prying looks of pity. I’d put my body through enough foolish duress over the years to know that it would always heal itself, even if the road to recovery was long and harrowing. I would never be whole again, but at least my surface wounds would fade with time, my pain sealed away somewhere deep inside of me instead of being on display for all the world to see. 

“Well, the good news is the bleeding’s stopped, but that’s one hell of a burn,” Jarrod remarked, his eyes radiating palpable concern when they latched onto mine in the darkness. “It needs to be treated, Tay… if not by a professional, then at least by one of us, somewhere that isn’t a deserted parking lot in the middle of nowhere.” 

“I have an idea,” Alex spoke up, unable to tear his own eyes away from my bloodstained shirt as I struggled to sit up. “My cousin Paul—the one whose basement I’ve been crashing in—lives a couple of blocks away. His wife’s a hospice nurse and keeps all sorts of weird medical shit in the house. Let’s go there and get you cleaned up. You can even rest for awhile… I’m guessing you don’t want to face your wife and kids looking like… well, looking like how I imagine you’re feeling right now. Come on, let me drive you. Jarrod, you can follow us there.” 

“What about everyone else?” 

My brows furrowed as it dawned on me that there should have been a entire group of them staring down at me with concern and justifiable confusion pouring from their eyes. Where was Isaac? Wes? Had Zac changed his mind and come back? Although certain events from the night were frighteningly clear, so much of it was still hazy, like a grotesque puzzle I had no choice but to complete even though I didn't want to. 

“I’m not even going to attempt the long version until we get to Paul’s,” Alex said. “But the short of it is that we all went out to a bar after the show, figuring you and Zac had run off somewhere to do unspeakable things to each other. But once last call came and went and you guys were still MIA, we started to get worried, and soon we knew that something was really fucking wrong. And since Jarrod was still relatively sober—not to mention, the only one of us who had access to a car, since my ride ditched me and Ike and Wes hauled ass back to Tulsa hours ago—he wanted to check here to see if you were passed out drunk in the backseat or something… and, well, that’s how we found you. Except you aren’t drunk, although that probably doesn't sound like such a bad idea right now, huh?"

"Your ride ditched you?" I asked, far too drained and exhausted to acknowledge his efforts to lighten the mood. “But who…? Oh.”

The remorse in his bloodshot eyes was more revealing than any words could have been. _Zac._ Of course. I should have made that connection as soon as I saw them talking in hushed whispers in front of the venue earlier that afternoon. They were growing closer to each other with every passing day, it seemed.

Clearing his throat, Alex waved his hand through the air as though to visibly dismiss the subject. 

“Let's head to my cousin’s house now, okay?” 

“Okay.”

Leaning back against the headrest, I closed my eyes and expelled a breath that made me feel ten tons heavier instead of lighter. It was a lie, though—it was possibly the biggest lie I’d ever told. They had to know that nothing was _okay_. 

Nothing would ever be okay again.


	17. Firecracker

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“The world turned and flung me.” - David Iserson._

“I made coffee.” 

The sound of Alex’s voice prompted me to open my eyes, although I honestly would have preferred vanishing into the darkness. 

“I don’t know if you’re even in the mood for coffee—if you’re not, that’s totally fine—but if you are… well, feel free to take your pick,” he continued with a wave of his hand toward the Keurig coffeemaker that I could just barely make out. “Paul showed me how to use this thing the other day, and now I’m addicted. I might’ve gone a little overboard, though…” 

Sitting up, I squinted through the half-light of the foreign basement until I focused on Alex, who had evidently taken it upon himself to prepare at least a half-dozen single cups of coffee while I was sleeping.

He was leaning against the island of the small kitchenette, his bloodshot eyes suggesting that he was far more exhausted than he was letting on. But maybe he’d pumped himself so full of caffeine that he couldn’t tell the difference anymore. I was certainly no stranger to that manufactured state of consciousness—to running on empty and using any form of coffee I could get my hands on as my fuel reserve. 

“What time is it?” I mumbled groggily.

“Quarter past five in the morning,” he answered, setting three cups down on the coffee table before retrieving the remaining mugs from the counter. “I couldn’t sleep, so I decided to test out all the different K-cup flavors in the cupboard. And since you’re awake, you can be my guinea pig.”

“What are my options?” I asked, unable to stop myself from cracking a feeble grin despite my suffocating sense of melancholy. 

Caffeinated Alex was fun—even more fun than drunk or high Alex. This was something I’d learned a decade ago but hadn’t been able to properly enjoy, considering the fact that every single time we drank coffee together all those years ago, we’d been suffering from what we were positively convinced were _the world’s worst hangovers_. Now, the experience was tainted once more, but by something far more permanent and lasting than the consequences of having done a little too much coke the night before. 

“Let’s see, we have breakfast blend, cinnamon roll, hazelnut, Italian roast, French vanilla, Jamaican Me Crazy… and the last one’s decaf,” he rattled off. “My memory is a godforsaken piece of shit, but I _think_ I got that right. Oh, and feel free to mix and match. I made a Jamaican French vanilla cinnamon roll earlier, and it was pretty damn orgasmic.” 

The ease with which Alex slid onto the couch beside me helped put _me_ at ease as well. Nothing about the situation at hand was remotely comfortable or easy, but the last thing I wanted was for people to tiptoe around me like I was some sort of time bomb just waiting to explode. Or worse, that I was damaged goods. It was bad enough to know that I’d be forced to carry the burdensome cross of anger, shame and horror for the rest of my life—but the thought of seeing those same emotions reflected back at me through the eyes of the people I loved was simply unfathomable. 

Sticking to what I knew, I selected the mug containing the Italian roast and inhaled deeply, a muffled “thank you” falling from my lips as I took a generous gulp. It seemed that Alex was far more perceptive than I gave him credit for; he sensed that I needed a charade of normalcy—that I needed something even just as simple and insignificant as coffee to bring me back to the world that had nearly been stolen away from me forever. Maybe he’d _always_ been that in tune with me, and I’d been too entrenched in the madness of my own life to see it. 

Leaning back against the couch, I let the strong, comforting aroma consume me. It’s difficult to explain how precious the simple pleasure of a hot drink was to me in that moment, as I struggled to offset the unsettling feelings crowding the hollow space inside of me. 

Although Alex remained uncharacteristically quiet as we sat together on the couch and sipped our coffee, I knew that he was desperate for the details. But I’d never been very good at looking back, fearing that if I did, I would get permanently lost in my mistakes. And what was worse than being held captive by your own unfulfilling past?

So as he continued staring at me with his gentle yet darkly imploring gaze, I blocked out the deranged, filthy act of defilement that would haunt me for the rest of my life and instead flipped through a hazy mental reel of images, a series of snapshots documenting what had happened upon arriving at his cousin Paul’s house. I had absolutely no desire to keep even the mildest of recent memories close, but my mind seemed determined to hold onto them, as if it needed evidence of my every living moment just in case my eyes soon closed for good.

The ride to Paul’s had been nothing but a blur. I felt drowsy and disconnected, and to this day I still don’t know if that was due to blood loss or my failsafe mechanism of self-defense. I didn’t want Alex and Jarrod to help me out of my vehicle. I didn’t want to be subjected to their looks of pity, rage, and fear. I wanted to curl up inside of myself and hold my breath until the world finally stopped spinning. 

But if I’d learned anything at all in my twenty-nine messy years of living, it was that there was no point in defying the people who are determined to save you. And so I let myself be ferried along by proverbial tides I had no desire to follow but was far too weak to fight. 

It probably should have been humiliating to stand completely naked in the small, air-conditioned bathroom in the basement and let Paul’s wife Sadie tend to my visible wounds—but I no longer cared about modesty. My self-worth had been reduced to vomit, piss, and ashes anyhow. Thankfully, as Sadie cleaned me up and searched for outward signs of infection, she kept her mouth shut, her motions practiced and efficient while she worked her hands along my aching body. Then again, she guided people into death for a living, so it’s no wonder she was able to handle me without flinching. 

In fact, she was so professional and poised about it that I very nearly asked her to show me the way. To help me stop the appallingly rational ticking of time. She probably dealt with all sorts of life’s victims—including but not limited to the chronically ill, terminal cancer patients, and people who were just plain crazy. Surely, there was a spot amidst their ranks for me.

But in the end, I kept my mouth shut, too, knowing that if I dared to speak my fucked-up thoughts, I’d wind up in a place far more unbearable than any sort of imagined Heaven or Hell. Once Sadie had secured a thick gauze bandage around my torso, laced with a soothing balm to ease the swelling, she handed me a pair of ill-fitting jeans, a t-shirt, and clean boxers, all which belonged to her husband and which she claimed he’d never wear again. As she left the room in order to give me privacy while I dressed, she politely ignored the soiled underwear that I’d balled up and flung into the trash can by the door.

After combing my fingers through my hair, a tired attempt to fashion not only the agitated strands, but my foul mood into something marginally more human, I slumped down onto the couch and stared blankly at the wall. The screen was shut but the front door itself was wide open, allowing me to catch bits of Alex and Jarrod’s conversation as they cleaned my car in the driveway, ridding it of the bloodstains and the lingering stench of ruin. Their voices floated down the stairs like pieces of driftwood, and I clung to them tightly in the hopes that I too might be carried away. I couldn’t hear any of the finer points of what they discussed, but my name came up more than once, as did Zac’s, the familiar syllables popping like fireworks before my weary eyes in the otherwise silent air.

“Zac,” I whispered, the word souring almost instantly on the tip of my tongue as I recalled our last conversation.

Yet I couldn’t deny the fact that I craved the bitter taste it left behind in my mouth. So many ugly things had happened to me that night, and there was so much I longed to let go of, but my exchange with Zac wasn’t one of them. Yes, he’d confused and frustrated me by running away from me again, but he hadn’t meant to _hurt_ me. And if he’d had even the slightest inkling of the very real danger I was in, he would have stayed.

He thought he could make things better by leaving… and who was I to blame him? I too was guilty of fleeing during thorny times—I’d done it before with Alex and Jarrod on occasion—but never with _him_. I guess when it came to Zac, the abrasions caused by our relationship were eclipsed by the fierce, healing nature of our deep, deep love. 

Alex must have eventually grown tired of Jarrod “bossing him around” and joined me in the basement to embark on his late-night coffee-brewing spree, but not before I fell into surprisingly unbroken slumber. Coiled up in the fetal position, I pressed my face into the back of the couch, the rough leather cool against my feverish skin and calming me down almost instantly.

The only dream I can remember having that night starred a brazen firecracker of a girl who’d lived next-door to my family growing up. Her name was Kathleen, but everyone called her Kat. With her competitive nature and no-bullshit personality, she fit right in with me and my brothers, and it wasn’t long before we were wreaking havoc on the entire neighborhood. One day, though, she didn’t show up after school in our usual meeting spot… and that day turned into a week, which turned into several weeks, which ultimately turned into months. Apparently, I was seen as the leader of our little group even back then, because I was always the one who wound up on her front porch, pounding on the door with the heavy brass knocker as I prepared the same question I asked every day: 

_Can Kat come out and play?_

Her mother greeted me with a new excuse each time. First, Kat had a nasty stomach flu. Then, she had a lingering case of pink eye resulting from the flu. Then a sprained ankle from having fallen off the tire swing. Then the chicken pox. Then a massive Social Studies project whose deadline was swiftly approaching. And so on and so forth.

But on one late spring afternoon, as I was walking home from a friend’s house, I spotted Kat’s face pressed against the living room window and nearly passed out at the sight of her. Her features were completely mangled; her once-rosy cheeks were bruised and gray, her nose appeared to have been broken and poorly reset, and her eyes were completely hollow. She looked not like a living, breathing human but like the ghost of a girl who had died long ago. 

I sprinted home and told my parents what I’d seen, but it was too late. The “For Sale” sign went up in their front yard the very next day. I never got to say goodbye to Kat, but I thought about her every day for months. God, how I pitied her. I used to lie awake at night and ask the trapped slivers of moonlight what it was like to live in a world from which there was no escape. 

But I no longer had to ask. The answer was inside of me—a pronounced sense of despair as dark as the dregs at the bottom of my coffee cup, as chillingly intimate as my mutilated heart.


	18. Stardust

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.” - Edgar Allan Poe. ___

The rest of July passed in a blur. 

It’s funny, isn’t it, how when people talk about things passing in a blur, they typically mean that time’s moving too quickly? And it’s not like I don’t get it. In fact, I’ve been guilty of using the phrase with that same connotation in the past, wishing the hands on the clock would just slow the fuck down so I could catch up.

But not now. 

No—when I say that the month passed in a blur, I mean that each new day was even more foggy and gray than the one before it. It was as if charcoal had been dragged across (or perhaps burned into) my retinas, preventing me from seeing and perceiving. Maybe it was a defense mechanism; maybe, in order to protect myself from what had happened, I needed space and distance that didn’t exist. So instead, I faded out. I feigned sleep but was always awake. I was there but not _present_.

I was on drugs.

Upon leaving Alex’s cousin’s house, I’d thanked his wife Sadie for the hospitality, and she had replied by gently prying open the fingers of my clenched fist and pressing a small baggie into my palm. She didn’t have to tell me what was in it, or that it would help ease the pain. I wasn’t nearly ignorant enough to not know the former or believe the latter.

An eighth used to last me a week, maybe even two if I was in a good place, but I burned through the entire bag that day, all by myself.

If it had been difficult to convey just how alone I felt during those dark, endless hours in which I was dehumanized, it was impossible to explain the cage of utter isolation I was sealed up in in the aftermath. To this day, I still can’t properly describe it. All I can say is before then, I’d never understood true loneliness. I’d never had to navigate the heavy, weightless depths of it. It was like drowning in a barren pool.

Jarrod and Alex tried to ground me, tried to keep me from its clutches, but I broke free of them and drifted into the clouds. I powered off my phone and drove for hours—how many is inconsequential and unknown; like I said, they were all smudged together—before careening to a halt in an old, abandoned parking lot. Right off the bat, I felt more at home there than I would have in my own house. It looked exactly how I felt.

I locked the doors and reclined my seat almost as far back as it would go, and then I bathed myself in the thick, earthy smoke as if it could cleanse me, knowing all the while that it couldn’t. Once every last dreg had been devoured, I realized that it wasn’t enough, so I dialed one of Wes’s loose acquaintances—one of those guys who had met me time and again at parties, but had never cared enough to know me—and struck up as casual a conversation as I could manage until I found what I was looking for. 

Maybe I should have been rattled—or more specifically, terrified—by the fact that the delivery boy wore a black, hooded sweatshirt strikingly similar to the one worn by the nameless figure who’d stabbed me at the bar. But pain takes up a lot of space; and after what I’d been through, there was no room for anything else. 

Without speaking a word, I tossed a wad of cash at him and retreated back into my shadow-filled car. My hands trembled fiercely as I crushed the line, but I managed not to spill or scatter. It had been awhile, but getting back into practice was easier than riding a bike, mostly because I knew that if I faltered, I wouldn’t fall. 

I was already at rock bottom.

As I bent over and snorted slowly, inviting the mingled scents of plastic chemicals and poison peace inside, I closed my eyes and found Zac staring back at me. He looked more like a ghost than a man, cheeks sunken, skin sallow, with an inky stain beneath his right eye that looked more like a tattoo than a bruise—but he was still so beautiful to me that I wanted to cry. The vision of him was such a contrast to the ugliness that consumed me, both outside and within. But that was all it was… a vision. A dream, dare I call it that. 

When my eyes snapped open, he was gone.

I blinked away the sharp hint of tears and settled back against the headrest, waiting for what would come. The first minute was agonizing. Beads of sweat dotted my hairline, and I wiped my clammy palms on the worn fabric of my jeans to rid them of the moisture that was in no hurry to dissipate. My heartbeat ringing in my ears like an alarm, I was acutely aware of how much I hurt, the pinprick buds of pain along my abdomen opening up like blood-red flowers in full and sudden bloom. But the second minute was more bearable, and the third even better than that. 

The moon washed over me, and my hyper-alert gaze latched onto freckles of dusty light in the sky, a patterned array that reminded me of stardust, and I reveled in the tingling sensation of relaxing into the arms of an old, familiar friend. 

In that moment, it was the only friend I had.

*** * * * * * * * * ***

Looking back, I wish I could say that it was a temporary coping mechanism. That I’d been in dire need of an escape and had traveled down that particular avenue of destruction as a result.

But that wouldn’t have been the truth—at least, not the whole truth.

Yes, I had needed a way out. Of course I had; I’d needed one more badly than ever before… but there was no logic, no reason that begged its case before pulling me into its airtight embrace. 

I wish I could take it all back. But if I’ve learned anything by now, it’s that I’m not allowed to be absolved of the wicked things that I’ve done. Not until I pay the price.

I didn’t stop after that night. I couldn’t. Cocaine is one hell of a drug, and it’s an even more dangerous habit. If not for Zac, I wouldn’t have been able to drop it the first time all those years ago. But these days, he wasn’t here, and I acted accordingly.

It wasn’t as if I blamed my little brother for my actions. The reason for them may not have been my fault either, but my regression was self-imposed, and I held myself accountable. 

Deep down, I knew I could turn elsewhere if I looked. Isaac, who had traded Oklahoma flatlands for the rolling hills of Ojai as he embarked on yet another trip with his wife and kids, was only a text or a phone call away. And Jarrod and Alex were always there for me; they’d more than proven that much by now. I also knew that at least one of them wouldn’t even bother to ask “how high?” before jumping. 

But I didn’t call, because I didn’t want them. I wanted _him_. 

If you asked me where Zac was, I wouldn’t have even been able to conjure up a response. He was clearly consumed by something… but what? His failing marriage? Wes? _Alex?_

Or had he thrown himself into something stronger just like I had? Not a human, but a trap perfectly designed to lure us in when we were fucked up beyond repair? 

Alex had informed me via an extremely long-winded voicemail that he was back in L.A. now, but that didn’t mean a damn thing. He’d never admitted it outright, but he had grown close to Zac during a time when more than a thousand miles separated them. They were even closer now.

Jarrod had been calling me with striking regularity as well, but I never picked up. All month, I’d ignored him the same way I’d feigned blindness to the terrible wounds I had acquired. 

I can’t count the number of times I stopped myself from reaching out to them to ask, “Does Zac know?” But I was certain neither he and Isaac had a clue as to what had gone down the night of the JJAMZ show; for my own sanity, I had to believe that. It helped justify the radio silence. 

It wasn’t at all unusual for Ike and me to take some time apart when we weren’t actively at work. Our separate lives had separate demands, after all. But things were, had always been different with Zac. We had never gone this long without talking.

When it became clear that nobody else was going to save me because I refused to let them, I clung to my vices and threw myself into new songs. We had already more or less solidified the sets for our tour overseas in the fall, but that didn’t stop me. I needed to create. I needed to channel my energy into something that wasn’t altogether damaging. 

So, I wrote. But the words, those fevered shapes of feelings, never amounted to anything more than etchings on a page; I made sure of that by burning the scraps of paper and watching all the embers die out. I didn’t trust myself to tell any stories in my addled state, even the all-too-real-ones. Still, I hoped for better days.

_“You sure you don’t need some of this?”_

_He dangled the ice-cream come in front of my face, taunting me with its forbidden sweetness. Zac had chosen strawberry, my forever favorite flavor, knowing that I would resist otherwise. In a waffle cone delicately dipped in chocolate, no less._

_I was done for._

_“I’m good,” I answered stubbornly, glancing away so that I didn’t drool at the sight of the delectable dessert._

_His selection of words weren’t lost on me. Zac may have been foolhardy at times, but he wasn’t careless with his language. Not with me. And he hadn’t just said ‘want’… he had plainly said ‘need.’_

_“C’mon, Tay, just a bite. Please?”_

_Never one to refuse him, I leaned in and gave the confection a hearty lick. It tasted like release, like deliverance, like all the things I felt for him but was too scared to admit._

_I was shocked by his straightforwardness just as much as I was by his playful tone. I’d made my fair share of messes over the course of the year, and Zac took it upon himself to clean them up. He never complained; rather, he acted like it was his duty, like taking care of me was something he was simply meant to do. As a result, we’d become estranged (not thanks to him, but thanks to me—admittedly, I kept him at arm’s length because I thought I had to)—but after that turning point, after that small but remarkably meaningful gesture, we weren’t just brothers again._

_We were **friends**._

_What I wouldn’t give to get that back_ , I thought as daylight struggled through the closed blinds.

I loved the trip, but I hated coming down. Was a half-hour of seamless bliss worth the anxiety and paranoia that gripped me when the high wore off? 

_Yes_ , I declared firmly.

This particular drug made me feel so alive. Sometimes, I even felt invincible, like nothing in the world could touch me, and it was in those moments that I could actually look directly at the mirror and not despise the stranger staring back at me. 

I craved the comforts that it brought me: I felt strong again, defined not by the horrors of my life but my triumphs. I felt capable and focused.

I shifted that falsely keen sense of focus to the bedside table, where the clock read 8:37PM. The sun would tuck itself away any minute now. I could do one more line. 

I’d already carried out my duties for the day. I wasn’t confined by any sort of unspoken curfew (Natalie was all too aware that I’d never heeded the spoken ones). But I was “expected” to be at the house with my wife and kids for dinner, where we settled around the table like a functional unit, and after, when I helped give the younger ones their baths. 

Then I was a free man (ha!). 

More often than not, I seized that flimsy, fabricated freedom and withdrew to our cabin in the woods, which is what I’d done that night. Although it clearly wasn’t the safe haven I’d once imagined it to be, I couldn’t seem to stay away. 

My eyes flicked back over to the vial next to the bed, my trusty tumbler of gin beside it. 

“Just one more,” I said out loud to no one, knowing it was a lie.

*** * * * * * * * * ***

It was quarter past ten when I heard it—the shout of breaking glass.

Yanked from a hazy half-dream where the best memories of my life danced darkly with my worst, I called out the only name that came to mind.

“Zac?”

No answer.

I bolted down the twilight-flooded hallway toward the bathroom and felt the shattered glass before I saw it. 

The mirror—the one that had witnessed more than one shower rendezvous with Zac, the very same one that was his sketchpad of choice when he felt inspired to leave me steam-fringed messages on the rare occasion that I stood beneath the spray alone—had been smashed to pieces, and in the center of the devastation was a question scrawled in bone-chilling crimson:

**_READY FOR ROUND 2?_ **


End file.
